Dental Office and Office Building

Located in the quant town of Martinsville, NJ, this building sits on a several acre parcel on a county collector avenue and is at the transitional point where residential houses meets retail and office buildings. This project had to be presented to and receive approval from the town’s architectural review committee and the zoning board. Although a large piece of property, it only has 100 feet of street frontage. Most of the property is wooded and has a significant elevation rise at the rear, making it unbuildable by local “steep land” ordinance. As a part of the local zoning ordinance, only the flatter, buildable area of the site could be used to calculate F.A.R. (floor area ratio) therefore permitting a building of only 5,000 square feet or a 50’ x 50’ footprint with two floors.

Because of the slope up from the street, the first floor of the building, located at grade at the front, had its rear portion built into the hillside. The rear portion of the building has its second floor at grade level making this floor also directly accessible from the ground. One challenge for this building design was that the civil engineer (who we did not work with during the initial site design) designed the site so there was only a 10 foot floor-to-floor height between the first and second floors. With an office building, this poses a difficult challenge architecturally since the floor construction has to be greater than 12” deep, there has to be room below that for HVAC ductwork, plumbing, clearance for light fixtures, and an adequate ceiling height for the first floor dental office space which also happens to be the owner and our client.

In order to properly design the dental space and guarantee there was adequate clearances in the ceiling for mechanical equipment and a decent ceiling height, we insisted on making the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical engineering a part of our scope of work.

To maximize the usable space, we used cold formed metal “C” joists which have regularly spaced openings in their webs to facilitate plumbing, electrical and limited ductwork runs. Working closely with our mechanical engineer, we coordinated all ductwork sizes and layout so all equipment would fit neatly within the ceiling space and with the floor structure. This eliminated any undo “surprises” during construction which would have otherwise conflicted with the interior design of the dental suite which we also provided as our scope of work.