Images: BGW
The renovated, mixed-use Grand in Escondido, California is home to New Vintage Church and its Christian Youth Theater.
The historic Ritz Theatre in downtown Escondido, California was in need of a major facelift, and New Vintage Church planned for a 21,018-square-foot remodeling and addition of the two-story landmark.
Known as “The Grand,” the idea was to convert the 83-year-old theater, which has been vacant since 2005, into a dual-purpose church sanctuary and theater that will be made available to the public. In addition to being the new home for the church and Christian Youth Theater, it would include a mixed-use center for the musical and performing arts and a single-screen movie theater.
Building God’s Way (BGW), the architect on record, came to the project with its partner/builder, Erickson-Hall Construction, when the property’s owners searched out a design-build team to work from an existing concept.
“We did all the construction documents, handled all the permitting, and have handled all the construction admin phase activities,” describes Josh Felix, lead architect, on the scope of BGW's work.
Scope of work
The intensive project put The Grand and New Vintage Church on track to open by the end of October 2020. The transformation included a complete building demolition and a full interior renovation, both under the constraint of not triggering a seismic design upgrade to the building, since it was an historic theater.
“That’s a very difficult thing to do—to completely gut the inside of a building and install new stage rigging, lighting, acoustical provisions, all into a building and not add over 10% of loading to the structure. That, from the get-go, was the biggest hurdle,” Felix reports. “So the first thing we did was identify the big-picture items that needed to be dealt with and [we] went head-first into a design centered around those options.”
A good deal of the original, pre-existing design during the conceptual phase was outside-focused and exterior elevation-centric, so BGW lended a great deal of interior design expertise, states Felix.
The team was tasked with transforming the existing theater space into a performance stage—two entirely different uses from an infrastructure standpoint.
Serpentina Clouds
“We came in and did thorough structural reviews, MEP reviews, life-fire safety reviews, and we basically had to redesign the whole interior of the building,” he notes. “Code required 50% more restrooms than were allocated for us in the conceptual design, the lobby is completely different, so that impacted the flow of the building, and we adjusted all the room sizes to meet what they were actually going to need.”
The team was also tasked with transforming the existing theater space into a performance stage, instead of a movie theater—two entirely different uses from an infrastructure standpoint.
“If you look at the plans, there are some similarities, but I think I changed every wall, did a complete reorganization of the lobby, changed the elevator and access through all the floors, and I added a rooftop observation deck that looks out over the city of Escondido,” Felix says.
BGW added a rooftop observation deck that looks out over the city of Escondido.
When it came to the exterior, a lot of the original design was centered around an almost seafoam green color, and the client expressed that they were not enamored with that choice.
“We wanted to keep the exterior as it was designed, which was important because it had gone through a complete conditional-use permit review,” Felix says. “What I wanted to do was make sure the client was aware of the colors selected and now it’s more of a grey with a blue tint to it, which is a very attractive color.”
Community interface
The previous design also offered no opening control on the lower floors, so someone could literary walk off street into the lobby, so BGW came up with a frameless glass rollup door assembly to close off the area, but not make it look like a garage door.
The renovated Grand, home to New Vintage Church, opened in October 2020.
Another challenge was some access issues, as the city did not want to change any of its sidewalks in this historic part of town. As a result, the BGW team had to transform all the doors going into the lobby with the exception of the glass rollup door, into sliding glass entries.
The company also detailed inside the building—all the floor finishes, wall finishes and ceiling finishes, plus did complete stage design, theatrical lighting and rigging.
“A real challenge was keeping all of the stage rigging components. It’s all suspended under the existing building structure,” Felix says. “That was very difficult to come up with. In designing that, we had to figure out a way to make it both functional and attractive. We came up with these serpentine clouds that snake off the stage to give a sense of a presidium element to the space. They are all wood-clad and an ‘S’ shape. They are broken in a way to discreetly hide the stage rigging structure from view.”
