Luxury in Your Apartment
New Kansas City homes offer best in security, plus convenience
- By Howard Carder
- Feb 01, 2018
Commerce Tower on Main, in
Kansas City, Mo., is redefining
downtown apartment living
by creating an energy-efficient,
vertical neighborhood
with luxury apartments, exclusive amenities
and a connected lifestyle. The building’s
LEED Gold Certified community combines
the best of traditional craftsmanship within
a resort-style setting.
With 355 apartments, Commerce Tower
on Main also features on-site restaurants, a
pharmacy, outdoor kitchen and an indoor
dog park. It is the place where technology
and service come together to create a complete
urban community.
Natalie Scott, director of operations for
EPC Real Estate Group, said that there are
several key points of focus for renovating and
upgrading the Commerce Tower. Originally
built in the mid-1960s, Commerce Tower is a
historic site, requiring a great deal of care and
planning to preserve the original character
while making room for modern upgrades.
“Once upon a time this building was
500,000 square feet of office space,” Scott said.
“We basically came in, emptied it out and
turned it into apartments and about 150,000
square feet of commercial space. It was important
that the building’s new space be energy efficient,
built with sustainable materials and be
as modern, safe and secure as possible.”
Adding security to the facility required
products that were not only sustainable but
also worked with mixed-use residential facilities
and provided the appropriate aesthetics
for a historic retrofit. ASSA ABLOY was able
to help Commerce Tower meet the challenges
of environmental product declarations and
provide labels for sustainable construction
with its access control, locks, doors, frame,
exit devices and power supplies.
“Providing solutions that work with every
single need is critical to our shared success
with our clients,” said Cliff Smith, integrated
solutions specialist at ASSA ABLOY Door
Security Solutions. “We love when we get
to partner together on projects that require
multiple levels of specificity. The end goal is
always to protect the people, places and assets
involved. But protecting the planet and
providing a high level of good design in the
process is also a critical part of our efforts.”
Access Control
Part of the modernization of Commerce
Tower includes the use of keyless, wireless
door locks for all apartment doors and residential
access points.
To achieve this level of credentialing,
management selected SARGENT IN120 Wi-
Fi mortise locks and doors and frames from
both Graham and Curries for all 355 apartments.
The facility also implemented HID
card readers on the perimeter of the facility,
and SARGENT electrified exit devices, Securitron
Power Supplies and Norton Power
Operators.
A keyless, battery-powered door lock also
served the purpose of both bringing in an exceptional
level of modern convenience for residents
while also allowing for the lock installation
without running any wiring or cabling
through the historic walls of the building.
“This is basically a keyless community
where residents use a mobile app for credentials
to enter their apartments,” Scott said.
“This is the first time that this type of community
has come to downtown Kansas City.
It’s an exciting feature, and residents have
embraced the technology and are enjoying
the benefits.”
Mixed-use Solutions
Using the space as both commercial and
residential also introduces a unique set of requirements
for access control and security, as
the building doesn’t behave simply as apartments
nor does it operate only during commercial
business hours. The introduction of
community amenities such as a gym, swimming
pool, sauna and playground introduces
another layer to the system’s complexity.
Add to that the fact that multi-family
and multi-use buildings are door-dense environments.
That means the management of
hundreds of brass keys and mechanical locksets
is an extremely cumbersome solution. It
results in the risk of lost keys and the high
cost and inconvenience of having to rekey
locks. Mechanical key systems are difficult
for property managers to effectively manage
access for tenants, employees, visitors and
contractors while ensuring that only those
who are authorized can gain access.
“One of our priorities with mixed-use
facilities is to find ways that simplify the
system and minimizes touchpoints for staff
that are managing the system,” Smith said.
“This largely links back to the credentialing
component. In many buildings today you see
environments where they need to manage
different parts of the building with different
software and different credentials, but at the
Commerce Tower they selected components
that are interoperable with their chosen flavor
of management software. This means
their staff can manage the system more effectively
and efficiently.”
Locks such as the IN120 offer advancements
in technology that make it possible to
deploy a secure, manageable and cost-effective
multi-family housing solution without
the need for complex or expensive infrastructure.
Further, the locks improve on the
ability to manage access remotely, assist with lockouts and provide temporary access to visitors or contractors.
Sustainability
ASSA ABLOY provides transparency in their products through detailed
ingredient lists, Environmental Product Decelerations, Health
Product Declarations and Declare labels. This effort matched the
desire of Commerce Tower to redesign in a sustainable manner and
meet its LEED Gold Certification.
“The LEED Gold Certification and the commitment to green
building is one of our big claims to fame,” Scott said. “Focusing on
sustainability and really everything behind sustainability and what
goes into it from green products to energy efficiency, has been a huge
part of the vision for what we wanted our story to be in downtown
Kansas City.”
Scott said that her team sought out partners who would not only
help them achieve compliance but also be partners in their commitment
and help them reduce energy consumption.
“When you look at renovation from this angle and consider that
the best way to deal with old construction is to be transparent in your
efforts to improve the building, then you know you want partners
who believe in that transparency as well,” Scott said. “When you find
the right people then you know, for certain, that everyone is willing to
go the extra mile with you.”
Historic Aesthetics and Good Design
Another critical element for Commerce Tower was to ensure that a
visibly stunning look in the redesign matched with the historic remnants
of the building’s past.
“We wanted to retrofit in the sense that things became modernized,
sleek and minimalistic,” Scott said. “At the same time there were
several areas of the building that we had to revive, and we couldn’t
touch due to it being a historic preservation and restoration. We had
to ensure that our design complemented those existing features.”
Everyone met this commitment to good design principles that
seek out ways to ensure that doors, openings and door accessories
compliment and highlight the rest of the building. A long-held belief
is that the door handle is the most immediate point of contact for
people in a building, and that by starting with excellent design at that
point of contact you define the user experience.
“Solutions for all of the many needs of a build are discovered by
making sure we are partners in innovation with the end user, the integrators,
and the architects and designers,” Smith said. “By listening
to the building owner, thinking insightfully and thoughtfully about
their intended use, then working with our partners and offering appropriate
options, we get to find success across the multiple areas,
and needs, of a building.”
Partners in innovation with all of its clients, ASSA ABLOY
seeks out ways to meet all types of needs for security, sustainability
and design. It is these efforts that result in buildings like Commerce
Tower leading the way in solutions for all types of uses and that
meet all types of needs. Building officials wanted
to be a trendsetter while respecting the history
of the building.
“What we came away with is something beautiful,”
Scott said. “The building speaks for itself.”
This article originally appeared in the February 2018 issue of Security Today.