commentHawks Boots Sustainable Manufacturing Facility
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TrueRide, a municipal skate-park manufacturer based until 2007 in Duluth, Minnesota, operated out of an old missile base that employees affectionately referred to as “the tree fort.” As the business expanded, the company grew weary of constantly reshaping its 25,000-square-foot office and production space, and in 2004 it hired Salmela Architects to convert a defunct burial-vault-manufacturing facility near Lake Superior into a workshop and office for the company. “The site was a complete mess when I first saw it,” says David Salmela, FAIA, principal of Salmela Architect. “Concrete columns, burial vaults, and pipes were scattered everywhere.”
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For only $63 per square foot, Salmela Architect renovated the existing, 14,200-square-foot building, added a second-story cantilevered office, and inserted the discarded burial vaults into the landscape to create artificial hills. “We could have just plopped the new building next to the old one, but we wanted to use the site to its maximum potential so employees could see dramatic views of the city, harbor, and hills,” says Salmela. Inside the open office space, TrueRide helped execute Salmela’s vision. The company built its own desks, installed
custom-designed Finland birch flooring, and finished the walls with the same recycled black Skatelite material used in constructing skate-park ramps.
By the time TrueRide moved into its new facility, dubbed Hawks Boots, the company had started two additional companies that use the same materials as its skate parks: Epicurean, a manufacturer of wood-fiber cutting boards, and Loll, a producer of outdoor furniture made mostly of high-density polyethylene. When the founders decided to sell TrueRide (now located in suburban Los Angeles) in 2007 to focus on the new ventures, the space’s flexibility made the switch easy. “Since we moved, we’ve increased our business by 278 percent,” says Greg Benson, company C.E.O. “Now, when clients come to our facility, they get an immediate sense of who we are and that we’re serious about what we do.”
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