Drexel Heritage Showroom

When a company's products are based on taste and style, it is important to have a stylish showroom in which to display them. This is why the Drexel Heritage Furnishings of Drexel, North Carolina, chose a Tilt-Up design for its new 100,000 square foot furniture showroom In High Point, North Carolina.

The building is unique because there are few two-story Tilt-up buildings in North Carolina. Most comparable structures are brick and block wall. Although Drexel saved $3 to $4 per square foot, the decision to use a Tilt-up system was based more on Tilt-up's ability to present a clean, modern look and to complete the project quickly.

High Point is considered the furniture capital or America. Each spring, the city is home to the International Home Furnishings Market. Because Drexel wanted the new showroom completed for the April 1994 home furnishings market and the project could not begin before October 1993, Tilt-up was a logical choice. The deadline was met.

The aggressive schedule made it necessary to first complete the rear half of the building shell so that interior work could begin there while the front half of the shell was constructed. This plan compressed the schedule by allowing different trades to work at the site simultaneously.

A small site presented additional challenges, and Tilt-up met them well. While smooth-finished panels with a pattern or vertical and horizontal reveals were used to create a contemporary look in an area or more traditional architecture.

The most striking feature or the building is an unusual glass wall, angled at four degrees off the plane of the front Tilt-up wall, that begins outside the building at one end and terminates inside the building at the other end. The idea for this angled glass wall goes to Melanie Dunn, director of display planning for Drexel. Architects at Calloway, Johnson and Moore, PA, in Winston-Salem, N.C., liked the idea, and incorporated it into the building design. This striking feature blurs the distinct ion between the exterior and the interior of Drexel's new High Point showroom.