After several meetings on the topic, The Snyderville Planning Commission on Tuesday night voted to allow an adaptive re-use for an historic building along Highway 224.
The applicant is Grady Kohler, proprietor of the Park City Nursery near the Blue Roof intersection on Highway 224. He was asking to create a coffee shop out of an old building, south of the Nursery. It’s known as the Archibald-Pace Store and was a general store in the Basin in the early part of the 20th Century.
The Snyderville Commission voted to recognize that the building is historically significant, and that it met the criteria for re-use.
However, before granting a Conditional Use Permit, they struggled to craft an approval that would preserve the building but allow the adaptation to meet building code and the needs of structural integrity.
A condition drafted by Development Director Pat Putt said the building must be preserved intact. If it is dissembled, the plan would have to come back to the Planning Commission.
Snyderville Commissioner Malena Stevens said they were thinking of a process called panelization.
“Part of that conversation and where some of the concerns came is from people’s experience actually in Park City with a lot of the historic preservations that have happened,” Stevens explained. “Some of the paneling has had to occur over the years and it hasn’t, from what they had explained, it hasn’t worked out as well as when there is no paneling. So that is something that we want to avoid. We put those conditions in that they can’t panel it there. They reported that their engineer, who wasn’t present, stated that they should be able to construct the building and bring it up to code without that. We wanted to make sure that they were clear that if they needed to do that we could come back to the drawing board and see if we could figure out a solution that worked for everyone and still preserved the historic structure.”
They also approved the use of a old side building, which will be converted to a restroom.
“It was a shed that was built in the same time that service at the main house as well as at the general store,” Stevens continued. “There are additional changes that are being made to that as far some cuts to the structure. They’re really just moving where the doors are adding a couple of windows and that was to make it ADA compliant for their patrons that come. With that having restrooms is a use that they could already do if they didn’t preserve that structure, they could have just torn it down built something else and had restrooms anyways. So we felt that in order to preserve that structure although there would be additional cuts it was worth having that main set of buildings preserved in perpetuity.”
We asked her if the Snyderville Code allows owners of historic buildings to just tear them down.
“Unless it goes through this process and is deemed historic which is beneficial to applicants such as in this case that they can utilize that structure for additional purposes that wouldn’t normally be allowed in that zone which is kind of the tradeoff,” Stevens said. “But if not it’s their property so in essence they could.”
On a related item, Stevens was just re-appointed to another three-year term by the County Council. But Tuesday was the last meeting for Planning Chairwoman Bea Peck, who is moving out of the area for a while.
Stevens said that Peck has done an exceptional job in the past six years.
“I’ve really appreciated her personally as I’ve been able to work with her,” Stevens said. “I’ve been on the commission now two years and it’s been great to learn from her expertise and just the way her mind works has been fascinating and helpful so thanks Bea.”
