Borelli Investment Company anticipates starting construction this week on Saich Way Station, a roughly 15,000-square-foot, $10.4 million retail center at 2803 Stevens Creek Blvd. at Saich Way. The work follows the securing of a $6.4 million construction loan obtained through Heritage Bank, said Ralph Borelli, chairman of San Jose-based Borelli Investment Co.

The project has already landed three tenants — the Melt, a growing San Francisco-based gourmet grilled-cheese chain founded by the founder of Flip Video; Blast Pizza, part of the emerging “custom-pizza” trend; and Vitamin Shoppe, the nutritional supplement superstore. That represents more than half of the space available, said Randol Mackley of SRS Real Estate Partners, which is marketing the center. Five retail spaces are still available.

The Cupertino submarket has become sought-after for retailers, thanks to high household income in Apple Inc.‘s home town. But there are few new projects that have gone up in recent years. The Sobrato Organization has repositioned Homestead Square, a Safeway-anchored center, and Sand Hill Property Co. is under construction on Main Street Cupertino, a mixed-use center near Vallco Shopping Mall.

“Cupertino has about a 2.6 percent retail vacancy rate,” Mackley said. “This will be the newest with sticks in the air.”

Saich Way Station replaces about 11,600 square feet of retail space between Cupertino’s Target and Whole Foods, considered an extremely desirable location. In 2008, a fire caused some of the businesses in the center to close. The property owner decided to scrape the site and rebuild the whole center in a joint venture with Borelli. Working through city approvals took about three years.

“It’s the No. 2 performing Whole Foods store in the entire chain, very desirable demographics and there’s very little ground-up development,” Borelli said.

One example of the strong environment for new retail in Cupertino was the financing interest from banks. Borelli said about half a dozen banks provided proposals to fund the construction.

“We had a lot of interest in it,” Borelli said. SiliconX Construction, an affiliated company of Borelli Investment Co., is the general contractor. Construction is expected to take about six months.

Reprinted from the Business Journal – read it here.

For more information about Saich Way Station, visit: www.SaichWayStation.com

SiliconX Construction has completed interior improvements on 10,000 sq. ft. of office space built around a stylish, flexible open office design at 161 E. Evelyn Avenue in Mountain View. The space includes 14 private offices, six colorful conference rooms, a reconfigured server room, electrical room, various multi-purpose spaces for employees, and a central area containing 85 open cubicle offices. SiliconX completed its work and ProQuest occupied the space on February 28th.

ProQuest is a leading provider of online solutions for students, scholars and information seekers of all kinds, as well as a conduit for the libraries and organizations that serve them. Its partnerships with key content holders have built a collection that encompasses 90,000 authoritative sources and 6 billion digital pages and spans six centuries.

Headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ProQuest is using the new space to accommodate the expansion of its fast-growing ebrary ebooks business unit that’s based in Palo Alto.

Challenging Technology and Energy Requirements

ProQuest required an extensive electrical and data infrastructure to support its open office cubicles, as well as the private offices and conference rooms. SiliconX devised a unique solution that included relocating an electrical subpanel more than 80 feet and installing an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for the server room that feeds approximately 100 workstations. Power and data service for the conference rooms was brought in through underground conduits.

“With 20-foot open ceilings, ProQuest wasn’t satisfied with a standard power pole solution,” said Anthony “Tony” Gonzalez, Director of Construction Operations and a superintendent with SiliconX Construction. “We developed and installed an innovative system that required hours of study, close coordination with the City of Mountain View, and modifications to the brand new furniture partitions.”

SiliconX also installed a Tridium Vykon Jace-600 building management system that ProQuest can use to remotely control nine heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) units over the Internet.

“Coupled with the other energy upgrades, this gives ProQuest a very comfortable, productive space in which to work while saving a projected $50,000 on electrical usage over ten years,” said Grant Zumido, project manager for CBRE. “That was very appealing to them.”

Moving In On Time

Other work handled by SiliconX included repainting virtually the entire space — including the ceiling — to match furniture colors and add attractive color accents. One large 30 ft. x 20 ft. wall was transformed into a projection screen for ProQuest to use as needed. In addition, SiliconX supervised the installation of the 85 office cubicles and furniture needed for all the cubicles and private rooms. This required two weeks out of the extremely tight 11-week construction schedule.

“At the very last minute, we also had to solve an issue that arose with two of the building’s exterior doors,” Gonzalez explained. “This necessitated close cooperation with the City of Mountain View and its inspectors. But we were able to obtain a temporary Certificate of Occupancy so that ProQuest could move in on the day they had always planned.”

For more information about ProQuest’s variety of flexible, cloud-based solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary® and EBL® businesses — and notable research tools such as the Summon® discovery service, the ProQuest Flow™ collaboration platform, the Pivot™ research development tool and the Intota™ library services platform — visit www.proquest.com.

For the full story about how SiliconX met ProQuest’s needs on time and on budget, or to obtain a quote on your next project, contact Tony at tony@siliconxconstruction.com, or call (408) 418-0099 (w) or (408) 318-1869 (c).