Brighton City Council OKs Excelda Manufacturing Site Plan

Downtown Brighton will be getting a new office building in the coming year.

Brighton City Council members approved site plans for Excelda Manufacturing at the former Chamber of Commerce location at 131 Hyne Street during a meeting Thursday night.

Excelda Manufacturing, an automotive parts manufacturer celebrating its 82nd year in business, purchased the property from the Downtown Development Authority last year.

The two-story building will be a little more than 12,000 square feet and about 30 feet tall.

Piet Lindhout, owner of Lindhout Associates -- the architects designing the new building -- said construction will begin as soon as weather permits, sometime around April 15. He also said he expects the project to be finished by the end of the year.

Lindhout said Excelda wanted the design to be of a building that people wanted to work in. To accomplish that task, Lindhout Associates designed an outside workspace garden, accessible to the wireless system inside. There's also a chimney, complete with a fireplace.

"We have a building without walls, without private offices," he said. "We have innovative, collaborative space. Some of the rooms are family rooms and there's a coffee bar. It's going to be a neat work environment. I'm really excited about it."

The building will even have circular restrooms.

"Why not make them them round?" Lindhout said. "Why not walk into a restroom and say, 'this is cool,' instead of 'here I am again.'"

The building also features many environmentally friendly aspects, such as permeable brick paving stones to allow drainage into the ground below, a bio-soil rain garden sustained through water collected on the roof and in the parking lot and even a geothermal heating and cooling system.

"We'll be putting in geothermal wells for a complete geothermal heating and cooling system," Lindhout said. "This building will have very light use of utilities and probably won't have gas service at all."

Gerri Barr, Excelda vice president of human resources and communications, said the new building will accommodate the company's sales, marketing and executive teams -- about 37 employees -- when construction is finished. The building plans would allow up to 50 employees.

"We looked at lots of options (for the new office building)," Barr said. "We wanted to be part of a downtown community, if possible, so that when people came into the office in the morning and they had errands to run or if they wanted to go out to lunch, they could do so on foot. We're kind of an active community. We looked at sites and/or buildings in five or six other communities and counties. Our owners are in Brighton, our other buildings are in Brighton and we wanted to stay in Livingston County if we could. We were thrilled that this ended up working out for us."

Brighton Mayor Jim Muzzin said he was excited about Excelda coming to downtown.

"This is a gem for the City of Brighton," he said.