Urban Revitalization - Creating Spaces That Inspire

The design for the first mixed-use urban Home Depot in the country was produced working closely with a multidisciplinary team of Home Depot representatives and consultants. The planned four-acre site is beside the core of Portland’s historic Hollywood District, and backing up to an interstate highway, and a few doors down from a light rail transit center. The program and architecture had to respond to the City’s award-winning Hollywood/Sandy Boulevard Vision Plan, which Laurence Qamar had taken part in drafting with LCA.

The Halsey Street front is designed with ground-floor retail storefronts, a garden center, offices on the second floor, and 26 apartments on the third and fourth floors. The 104,000 sq. ft. Home Depot store itself would largely be screened by these uses, including two floors of structured parking above.

The mixed-use building transitions between a regional expressway to its rear and downtown Hollywood to its front. This Home Depot project, while not built due to a recession, preceded a growing movement in coming years for urban, mixed-use ‘big box stores’ in other city centers by Home Depot and similar large format retailers.