Located on a busy street in San Luis Obispo, California, the Broad Street Storage facility came with a variety of design goals, the primary being to serve as a modern, attractive and functional storage space for the local community. The owners also requested that the facility blend in with the already-existing architectural surroundings.

“It was important to the owners, who live in the community, to erect a self-storage facility that was functional and enhanced the aesthetics of the San Luis Obispo community,” said Raul Gonzales, project manager for MakoRabco Steel of Carlsbad, California, the installer on the project. “The main building, nearest the road, featured towers and pop-outs (awnings) to help with drainage and add an aesthetic element to the building.”

MakoRabco Steel utilized metal roofing and wall panels from McElroy Metal to achieve the client's desired outcome. The team erected three buildings during Phase 1 of this project, for a total of 442 units and nearly 60,000 square feet. These three structures included metal panels from McElroy for the roofing, end walls and side walls.

The roofing was a 24-gauge Mirage concealed fastener panel, some coated in Sherwin-Williams Fluropon PVDF in charcoal and some in Galvalume. A 26-gauge U-Panel was installed on the end walls, as it offers a “lower profile and softer appearance than R-Panel or Multi-Rib” according to McElroy. A 26-gauge Multi-Rib panel (the company’s proprietary version of the industry’s standard R-Panel) was used for the side walls, both in Sherwin-Williams Fluropon PVDF in clay.

Clay trim along with charcoal gutters, downspouts, awnings and soffits also came from McElroy, and Janus International manufactured the cedar red exterior roll-up doors and glossy white interior roll-up doors.

“The design was a collaboration between us, the architect and the county, and since it’s on such a heavily trafficked road, we did work with the county to make sure the façade of the property was designed in a way that was aesthetically pleasing,” says Chase Morgan, of Morgan Enterprise, the owners of Broad Street Self-Storage. “The county did push us, in a sense, to make it a little more aesthetically pleasing than normal. Eventually, we agreed with the county that we were okay with the design, the arches (and) the architectural details on the front. We figured this could be our flagship self-storage facility.”

Currently in the drawing stage, Phase 2 will double the storage capacity via the addition of two more buildings.