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The former Best Products headquarters is being converted into a “living building” as part of the GreenCity development. (Image courtesy GreenCity Partners LLC)
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The former Best Products headquarters, circa 1985 (Photo courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch Collection, The Valentine)
For nearly two decades, a roughly 300,000-square-foot office building in Henrico County served as the headquarters for Best Products Co., the Richmond-based retailer that rose to fame in the 1970s and ’80s with its innovative catalog-showroom format before shutting down in the late ’90s.
Developer GreenCity Partners LLC now plans to turn the Best Products building into the world’s largest “living building.” To earn the living building designation from Seattle-based nonprofit International Living Future Institute (ILFI), a structure must have an urban agricultural component, create more net positive energy and net positive water than it uses, and satisfy other criteria, including providing a year’s worth of eco-performance data to a third-party auditor. The living building will be part of the GreenCity ecodistrict, a $2.3 billion mixed-use development that will feature an arena that will seat up to 17,000.
Earlier this year, the 58,000-square-foot PAE Living Building opened in Portland, Oregon; if certified next year, it will be the world’s largest living building. GreenCity’s proposed living building will be roughly five times that size.
Typically, structures that receive living building certifications are smaller in scale and aren’t commercial buildings. They’re also usually built from scratch.
“There’s some challenges [of adapting an existing building], but then there’s some benefits because of the configuration of the building,” says GreenCity co-developer Michael Hallmark, adding that because the building is low and wide, it has a large rooftop area. The rooftop will accommodate agriculture, feature solar panels and capture rainwater. “We’re going to try to blur indoor/outdoor in some places,” Hallmark says. “Waste will all be processed on-site, so there’s no dumping into the sewer.”
Lisa Carey Moore, director of ILFI’s buildings team, says that GreenCity’s proposed living building will help lead the charge when it comes to sustainable buildings.
“By publicly committing to the Living Building Challenge and the objectives within it, they have the potential to influence the marketplace,” she says, noting that a project of this size will show manufacturers of building supplies that there’s a demand for this type of undertaking. “That’s really key in terms of having a project at scale where they’re going to need many hundreds — if not over a thousand — products for this building.”
While there are proposed living building projects in the ILFI pipeline that are larger than GreenCity’s, they haven’t been publicly announced.
“Achieving the goals of the Living Building Challenge in the former Best Products headquarters will set the new international standard for sustainable development,” says John Vithoulkas, Henrico’s county manager, via email. “Having the largest self-sufficient commercial building in the world here in our county creates not only a positive impact to our local ecosystem, but also a new niche of economic development possibilities.”
Hallmark believes GreenCity’s living building will open in 2025, the arena will debut in 2026 and the development’s residential components could be available as early as 2024.
“The hope is that many, many, many more buildings like this will happen,” Hallmark says. “This isn’t necessarily a race to be larger. This is really a challenge to be more efficient, so size is less important than performance.”
