Garvin Design Group

Happy birthday to GDG Principal Mark Timbes!

Today marks 10 years since Alex first joined our team. Our firm has grown tremendously since Alex's first day, and she's been an integral part of so many milestone projects along the way. Thank you for 10 amazing years, Alex!

Happy birthday to our beloved office manager, Kate! Wishing Kate a whole year of celebration.

A small-scale brick brownstone – this is in New York, right? Nope. This one’s in downtown Columbia, South Carolina.

The distinctive three-story brick brownstone apartment building at 1116 Blanding Street was constructed in 1911 and known as the Marlboro Apartments. Designed by the prominent South Carolina architecture firm of James B. Urquhart, the Marlboro Apartment building features projecting polygonal bays on either end of the façade, a painted metal cornice, and a tan belt course dividing each story. Though small-scale brownstone apartment buildings are common in other cities, the Marlboro Apartment building is a rare local example of its type.

For the better part of the 20th century, the Marlboro Apartments housed six rooms for boarders. It had fallen into disrepair by 1983, when an intrepid team of local preservation enthusiasts adapted the building for new office use. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2014 as a Contributing Resource in the Columbia Commercial Historic District.

And it’s about to get a glow-up: Garvin Design Group and Hood Construction are currently undertaking a comprehensive rehabilitation to restore the Marlboro Apartment building to its original function.

What do you call a new seafood restaurant located in a 1953 sporting goods store that once had a boat showroom? Slip 53, of course.

Constructed in 1953 for Gasque’s Sport Shop, the two-story brick building at 732 Saluda Avenue has long been known to Columbia locals as the home of Pecknel Music. It features a cutaway corner at the main entrance in its southwest corner and large glass display windows overlooking Saluda Avenue.

Gasque’s Sport Shop kept a boat showroom on the building’s second level – a surviving boat lift armature at a sliding bay door at the back of the building recalls the Gasque era. The building had multiple tenants throughout the 1960s, including Freeman’s Sport Shop and Commercial Office Furniture Company. Pecknel Music Company moved into the building in 1971. In the 1980s, Pecknel demolished the southwest corner of the second floor to create a double-height area at the building's entry and covered the stacked-stone façade with stucco.

In 2019, the Pecknel Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a Contributing Resource within the Five Points Historic District. The building is currently being adapted for reuse as a seafood restaurant named Slip 53, an homage to the building’s past as a boat shop and its construction date.

Our friends at Hood Construction are celebrating their 40th anniversary, and we’re marking the occasion with a look back at the history of their home at 1215 Shop Road.

Originally constructed for apparel manufacturer Citadel Shirt Corporation, 1215 Shop Road housed a series of apparel manufacturers throughout the midcentury, including Bud Ferman and Femwear. Construction and expansion of the building from 1950 to 1959, specifically for use in apparel manufacturing, speaks to the subsector’s growing importance to the economies of Columbia and South Carolina.

The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) used the building as a warehouse for its Carolina Area Support Center (CASC) from 1968 to 1972. Selected for its proximity to growing Fort Jackson and its central proximity to ten military bases in the Southeast, 1215 Shop Road’s tenure as the CASC’s warehouse underscores Fort Jackson’s growing importance to both the Department of Defense and the local economy.

The building housed Blazer Boats briefly in the mid-1970s and was home to Columbia-owned and operated Morris Furniture from 1979 to 2007. It sat abandoned for 12 years. Successive generations of use as an apparel manufacturer and warehouse ensured 1215 Shop Road retained many of its historic architectural elements, including its large open floor plan, high barrel-vaulted ceilings, bowstring trusses, and large steel storm windows. Hood Construction’s careful rehabilitation of the building in 2019 leveraged Columbia’s Bailey Bill tax incentive and carefully preserved the building’s surviving historic features.

The project won an IIDA Carolinas DesignWorks Award for Adaptive Reuse in 2022 and a Historic Columbia Preservation Award in 2023.

One of this building’s midcentury tenants ties it to the next building in our series…check back here next week for more on that connection.