Despite an unusual protocol-breaking interruption at the Thursday, Nov. 6 meeting of the Architectural Review Board, the bulk of the group’s two-hour discussion of the proposed senior living complex at 345 Belden Hill Rd. did focus on the aesthetic matters that are the mandate of ARB.
ARB is an advisory group to the Planning and Zoning Commission that offers architectural, landscape and lighting guidance to applicants and submits recommendations to P&Z to help inform their review. Topics related to zoning regulations, site usage, permits, traffic and impact on town services are the purview of P&Z and will be addressed once the commission’s public review process begins later this month or next. This includes the matter of the School Sisters’ deed restriction that ignited debate at a pre-application meeting of P&Z earlier this year.
Hines Acquisitions is in contract to purchase the properties at 329, 331 and 345 Belden Hill Rd., collectively known as the former site of the School Sisters of Notre Dame retirement community. The company has proposed a comprehensive senior living facility on the 38-acre site that will house 280 people across a network of independent living cottages (32 flats within eight cottages), independent living apartments (176), assisted living apartments (48) and memory care studios (24).
Editor’s note: The project has garnered some organized community opposition, largely marshaled through a group of residents who have formed the Wilton Neighbors Alliance. GOOD Morning Wilton has a story running today on the Alliance.
Design, Color and Articulation
Even for a large-scale proposal like this, the team of people presenting on Thursday evening was unusually large, with 14 different professionals assembled.
Cheryl Mestre presented on behalf of Senior Resource Group, which runs 21 communities across the United States. She said the company prides itself on design, aiming to match the architecture of their developments to the communities in which they sit. She pointed to the Maravilla Scottsdale and the Maravilla Santa Barbara projects, designed in Mediterranean and Spanish-revival styles, as examples.
Describing the design intent behind the proposed 345 Belden Hill facility, architect Jaime Butterfield of Perkins Eastman emphasized the group’s effort to “break down the scale” of the buildings with undulating rooflines and a natural tone color palette in the materials.
“Hopefully you can tell here that there’s a great deal of variety that we’re hoping to introduce into the elevations, with an undulating ridgeline, the use of chimneys, and features to create a little bit of personality as you move around the building,” he said.
The primary materials for the facades will be thin-stone veneer and fiber cement siding (often known by the brand name Hardie board) in clapboard, shingle, and board and batten treatments. The roofs will be mostly be asphalt shingle, with small sections of metal roof on certain dormers.
Several ARB members praised the color palette of the project, with Chair Kevin Quinlan in particular calling the appearance of the buildings elegant.
“The palette is restrained,” he said. “It’s not going crazy trying to be exciting, just for the sake of being exciting. It’s very buttoned up and refined. And I think it’s a handsome building in that regard.”
Site Layout, Landscaping, and Views
The existing chapel will be preserved and most of the parking has been moved below grade. The east section of the development is set 150-feet back from the road, an unusually large buffer allows them to retain much of the existing landscape and trees along Belden Hill.
Regarding the layout of the site, Butterfield explained that the bulk of the development, the main building, is set back from the road at a similar position as the current structure, roughly 300-feet from Belden Hill Rd.
“The cottages, those smaller buildings that are shared residences, are shaped like houses well-suited to the residential environment along Belden Hill,” he explained. “Those are the first buildings that you will see.”
However, these eight two-story cottages that sit closest to Belden Hill are quite a bit larger than their name suggests. Every “cottage” hosts four two-bedroom apartments, plus a common area and elevator bank, making the eight buildings nearly 11,000 square feet each. They would be set back 150-feet from the road at roughly the distance where the chapel sits, and will be partially shielded by existing and new tree plantings on the site.
Along Highfield Rd. to the south, the buffer is smaller at just 50-feet, but the area will be planted with trees and bushes.
ARB Member Trevor Huffard, who will soon join P&Z as a newly elected commissioner, pushed the applicant on whether their vision for naturally screening the property on this boundary was realistic.
“On Highfield Rd., the buffer area is very thin,” he said. “So even if you pack that with the trees that were shown in some of the pictures, you’ve got a three-story building that you’re screening. Do you really believe those trees will be 30 feet tall?”
Landscape Architect Wesley Stout reiterated that the plantings for that area of the site would be substantial, with 80 new evergreens planned. “Can I say you won’t see a window in the winter?” he said. “No, that’s pretty hard to do, but a lot of this plant material will go in at the 10-20 foot range, and some of the bigger trees could be 25 feet or more. So it won’t take very long to get a pretty heavy buffer.”
Historic Preservation and Adaptive Reuse
Quinlan asked about the planned demolition of the stone Volmmer House that currently sits on the site near the corner of Belden Hill and Highfield. He noted that the Tudor-revival building is on the National Register of Historic Places and was included in Wilton’s recent historic resources inventory. The Historic District and Historic Properties Commission discussed the site in May, when Chair Lori Fusco saids she was “encouraged” to hear the developer and some P&Z members express interest in keeping some of the existing structures during the project’s pre-app hearing.
“Did you consider retaining that building at all and making it into a cottage and retrofitting it as such?” he asked.
Sophie Nitkin from Hines explained that retrofitting the building to meet current regulations would “dramatically reduce the historic significance of the building” so the company decided to demolish it.
Quinlan also asked about the fate of the Lithuanian stained-glass windows currently on the site. Sister Charmaine Krohe of the School Sisters of Notre Dame noted that they are in touch with the donors of the windows and have their blessing to “do what’s needed for the sale of the building.”
Butterfield declined to promise that the windows would be retained, saying that more investigation was needed into the quality, structural integrity, and performance of the windows needed to be studied.
“He has such a wonderful body of glass work, some of which, I think, is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,” Quinlan said, referring to the artist V.K. Jonynas. “And it would so wonderful to keep the windows if you can keep them intact.”
A 2017 profile on Jonynas after his death described the windows he created for the School Sisters chapel in Wilton as “breathtaking in their lucid intensity” and called them the “most celebrated stained glass installation” of his career.
Looking Ahead
At the conclusion of last week’s ARB meeting, the Board agreed to submit comments to P&Z sharing their comments on the proposal, “good, bad, cautionary and otherwise,” as Quinlan described it. P&Z is expected to begin public review of the project later this month, or more likely, in December once the new commission members have been seated. Following Tuesday’s election, P&Z will undergo an almost 50% turnover, with four new commissioners joining the nine-member group.