Boise Plaza to spend $1.1 million to renovate city’s ‘best lobby’

Owners of the Boise Plaza are spending $1.1 million to renovate the eight-story lobby in the iconic Downtown building.

They’ve already removed the giant ficus trees that dominated the four corners inside the building. Workers are now taking out more than 6 feet of dirt from the triangle-shaped planters where the trees grew in the 35-foot-high lobby.

Smaller planters will be flanked by seating areas, a coffee bar and other additions meant to create a more friendly lobby, said Scott Schoenherr, a partner in Rafanelli & Nahas, a Boise commercial real estate development and management company that owns the building. The brown tile will be replaced by a lighter color and there will be patches of bamboo flooring around the seating areas.

“It’s already the nicest lobby in Boise,” Schoenherr said. “It’s going to be a real showpiece when it’s done.”

The company , which bought the building in 2006, wants it to become usable space where people could step out of their office and work at a table on the ground floor, take a break or meet with clients. That’s quite a difference from its intent when it was built, he said.

“This lobby was really built as a pass-through when Boise Cascade owned the building,” Schoenherr said. “It was just a place people walked through on their way to the offices upstairs.”

The building at 1223 W. Jefferson St., which opened in 1971, was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merill. The Chicago firm also designed the Burj Khalifa, a Dubai skyscraper that at 2,722 feet is the tallest building in the world; One World Trade Center in New York City; the John Hancock Center in Chicago; and the former Sears Tower, know known as the Willis Tower, also in Chicago.

In June, Thomas Zabala, co-founder of Boise firm ZGA Architects, called Boise Plaza “one of the better buildings around town.”

“It’s not overly ornate, but when you start walking around that building and you look at that whole first floor lifted up off the ground 30 feet or so and the interior of that lobby, all the way to the skylights above, it’s really an impressive building,” Zabala said. “And you’ve got an owner there that is very conscientious about maintaining the quality of the building.”

Boise Cascade, a timber products company, still leases 1.5 floors. Cradlepoint, a tech company, is also a major tenant, along with Northwestern Mutual, a financial services firm.

Two years ago, Rafanelli & Nahas replaced the paint in the eight-story open atrium from brown to white. The brown had been a nod to the building’s earliest days as Boise Cascade’s headquarters.

“Lighter and brighter is what’s in now and it makes it a lot more inviting,” Schoenherr said.

The lobby, which has 10,000 square feet of space, is divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant has a triangle-shaped plantar created by upturned concrete beams that will be removed.

The company spent $20,000 to $30,000 to remove the trees, Schoenherr said. Most of them were saved and given new homes, he said. Stack Rock Group, a Boise landscape company, will bring in new trees and plants.

Rafanelli & Nahas is also planning a new office building a block south of Boise Plaza. The 10-story building, at the southeast corner of 11th and Idaho streets, will also include a small park between it and Boise Plaza.

This story was originally published September 20, 2018 at 4:23 PM.