The Moab headquarters of Western Spirit Cycling Adventures (478 S. Mill Creek Drive) will look very different soon as plans to demolish the existing building and construct a new multi-use building come to fruition.
“We’ve been working on it for about two years,” said Ashley Korenblat, CEO and co-owner of Western Spirit with Mark Sevenoff. “Our existing building feels like it was built in 15 minutes and is falling apart, so we thought long and hard about what we should do.”
While the cycling tour company considered building a campus outside of the city and selling the current property, located close to the intersection of Mill Creek Drive and 400 East, Korenblat said that ultimately it made more sense to build a thoughtful, custom-designed headquarters.
“It’s so fun to be a part of something that is for a company that’s very much a part of our community and seeing them expand,” said Courtney Kizer, primary architect for Architectural Squared. Kizer worked with Korenblat to plan the building to meet the company’s specific needs.
“It feels like we’ve been here for a hundred years so I had a good idea of what I wanted for function and what the design should be,” said Korenblat.
“They’ve got a lot of different parts of their business that operate differently,” said Kizer. “On one hand, they have a shop that needs to maintain bikes, they need a place for storing bikes, but they’re also primarily an office.”
On top of that, since Western Spirit has employees all over the West, the building was designed to provide temporary housing as well.
“It’s a mishmash of all of these different occupancy types,” said Kizer. “Marrying those together with the code was a challenge not only for us, but also for the building and planning department. We were really thankful that they worked through issues that aren’t necessarily commonplace in the building code with us.”
Zoning was another hurdle to the process: the property was originally zoned residential.
“We worked with the city to get it rezoned to neighborhood/commercial, which fits into the Moab Master Plan of having some off-Main Street hubs,” said Korenblat, who noted that the zoning change seemed natural since building a home at that location “would be awful, since Mill Creek Drive is so loud.”
“Mill Creek is a major artery now, so we’re hoping that the new building is actually going to buffer the noise of the street for the houses behind us,” said Korenblat. “We are really trying to meet the goal of that neighborhood/commercial zone. We’re quiet, low traffic and don’t offer any day trips or a retail store.”
Dates for the demolition of the old building and groundbreaking on the new building are still being finalized. Josh Ray of Delray Construction, Inc., is the contractor.
“We’re still working through the final financing and building permit process,” said Kizer. “Hopefully, really soon, but an exact date is unknown.”
“This project is very much, all the way around, a local project by a local team for a local company using a local contractor,” said Kizer. “To me, it feels like the ultimate collaboration of people that live in and love this community.”
