The Renovated Warehouse Food Hall Isn’t as Old as You Think; Behind Its Brick Cladding Is a Successful Act of Human-scale Place-making

It’s one thing to give a century-old warehouse new life. Whatever difficulties may accompany renovation, the exposed brick walls and wood floors create atmosphere, and the building’s age means it comes with a story to tell.

At first glance, the Warehouse Food Hall in downtown Boise, Idaho, could perhaps be mistaken for just such a rehab, 100 years or more in the making. After all, it’s located in downtown Boise’s National Register-listed South Eighth Street Historic District, home to many early-1900s buildings. Make no mistake: The Warehouse Food Hall represents a true transformation, though not one involving a century-old warehouse. Instead, this reclamation project involves commercial architecture less than 20-years old.

“The entire block was built around 2005,” explains Rob Gerbitz of Wisconsin-based Hendricks Commercial Properties, the Warehouse Food Hall’s owner and developer. “But the reason we bought it is we wanted to bring it back to what that block was generations ago.”

Since its completion, the public has flocked to the food hall’s 20 different eateries and bars across some 20,000 square feet. It has been redeveloped along with two adjacent properties on the same block: the Treefort Music Hall from a former Office Depot store and the Bodo Cinema, which refashions a Regal Edwards Boise chain’s second-run multiplex (its theaters occupy the floors above the Warehouse Food Hall).

MILLENNIAL ROOTS

Although today tourists and locals flock to downtown Boise’s renovated historic buildings, in the 1960s and ’70s they were becoming an endangered species. “Downtown Boise was doing what a lot of downtowns were doing: trying to build the competitor to the suburban mall,” Gerbitz explains. “They started tearing down buildings and adding parking lots,” to the department stores that were left to create suburban-style retail. “But the vast majority of them didn’t work. The architecture was suspect at best. It was basically just a bunch of big boxes that had retailers in them.”

The Warehouse Food Hall building was part of a redevelopment surge in the late 1990s and 2000s, after completion of the Boise Centre began bringing large convention crowds to the neighborhood. But the setting was still lackluster, with a highway couplet and an array of large-scale buildings leaving few options for those seeking a smaller-scale sense of place. By the time COVID arrived, these businesses were already vulnerable. “This area was a little sluggish in terms of pedestrian traffic. A lot of the tenants were leaving,” Gerbitz says. It’s a story that transcends Boise, as brick-and-mortar retailers have fought a losing battle to online shopping.

BEFORE: The Warehouse Food Hall building was part of a redevelopment surge in the late 1990s and 2000s, after completion of the Boise Centre began bringing large convention crowds to the
neighborhood. PHOTO: courtesy CSHQA

It didn’t help that the existing building, despite its relative newness, seemed to turn its back to historic Eighth Street. The adjacent theater felt like a fortress, its upper floors almost entirely windowless and its façade pushed to the edge of the block, creating little visual interest and no room for outdoor seating. “The façade didn’t quite have the character and the charm that I think Eighth Street deserves,” says James Marsh, a principal at CSHQA, the project’s architect. “Hendricks wanted to restore the integrity of the urban fabric in that district.”

CREATING PEOPLE-FRIENDLY SPACES

The desire to restore the urban fabric’s integrity is why this nearly block-sized building had to be more than renovated. It needed to be redesigned at human scale. While there was no old building to work with, the design team from CSHQA tried to consider the qualities that made these renovated early-20th century warehouses and storefront buildings beloved, be it the materials they were made of or how they were proportioned. But the true test would come in how these new spaces—the Warehouse Food Hall’s ground-floor setting or the Treefort Music Hall’s roof deck—attracted the public.

The food hall creates energy and fun by doubling down on small businesses and choice with shared seating for an array of smaller food-and-drink establishments. It not only offers variety, but creates an opportunity for small food-and-drink entrepreneurs, including food-truck operators looking to migrate to brick-and-mortar spaces, with not only the main tenant spaces available but a temporary pop-up space.

“It’s really meant to be a gathering place,” Gerbitz says. “We have great variety. You can go with a party of four and all of you can eat something different, from barbecue to lobster to Asian. You’re seeing very young entrepreneurs that are just starting their journey and what they’re trying to do. That’s a pretty fun thing to watch.” The Warehouse Food Hall also collaborates with the adjacent venues; the Treefort Music Hall curates a succession of deejays and live bands to appear in the food hall common areas.

PHOTOS: Tobin Rogers unless otherwise noted

The design combines aspects of a historic warehouse, particularly its brick cladding and wood floors, with traditional mixed-use retail buildings of that same era with classical proportions, base-middle-top division. The architects also broke up the monolithic mass of the existing buildings by creating a varying series of façade depths and alternating colors, which creates the sensation of multiple buildings along the block but had a functional purpose: Pushing out the façade
in some spots created room for ventilation shafts for the Warehouse Food Hall’s many kitchens. In addition, the developer and architects were thinking from the start about how they could create more indoor-outdoor permeability, including features present today, like glass garage doors for storefront retail that can open and disappear and the rooftop bar atop the adjacent Treefort Music Hall.

While there was no old building to work with, the design team from CSHQA tried to consider the qualities that made these renovated early-20th century warehouses and storefront buildings beloved, be it the materials they were made of or how they were proportioned.

Inside, CSHQA broke down interior walls wherever possible to make it easy for customers to move between venues without going outside. “There’s a lot of free flow between all of these things,” Marsh says. “The hope is that you really get the synergy between the entertain- ment portions of the music hall and the theater and the food hall. Now it’s just one big open space.”

INSISTING ON QUALITY

To create something authentic-feeling—that warehouse ambiance without the warehouse—materials mattered. “The nice thing with a client like Hendricks is their willingness to use good materials. They love to have buildings that look like they have some age to them, that have character to them,” Marsh adds. That meant not taking the cheaper way out. “We were not just going to use brick on the ground floor and then try to fake up a historic building full of EIFS two or three stories above. They wanted nice windows. They wanted brick all the way up. They wanted to use as many high-quality materials as we could for the extent of the project. And I think that alone really helps on projects like these.”

The Warehouse Food Hall’s signature exterior material, for example, is a thin brick, not a brick veneer. “You still see the brick course and you can tell the brick has a little bit of a variation to it because they don’t quite line up and there’s a little bit of relief to them and it’s not exact,” Marsh says. Inside, the design called for 3/4-inch wood, not wood-aping synthetic flooring.

Today downtown Boise is booming, with the Warehouse Food Hall just one of many new developments, including a new (but old-looking) hotel by the same developer just down the street. It all started with the Warehouse Food Hall’s act of place-making. “We wanted some- thing that’s collectively going to bring a lot of different people from the commu- nity here and say, ‘This is pretty cool. This is fun to hang out here,’” Gerbitz says. “We wanted to really pay a lot of tribute to that earlier history of Boise that the historic district represents, which is pretty awesome.”

PHOTOS: Tobin Rogers unless otherwise noted