building of distinction
75
“THE CONCEPT WAS to create a medical hub in an
untapped market,” says Bryan Durham, emergency physi-cian,
former Medac partner and current managing part-ner
of the Medac shareholder’s management company,
which now owns the building.
The medical group worked closely with a University of North
Carolina Wilmington master’s program to determine the best site. The
study looked at the potential of the untapped market and analyzed
served versus unserved areas, area growth, population and migration.
With an overwhelmingly positive response from the real estate case
study, plans were made to break ground on the heavily wooded lot in
2003 and be ready for patients and new tenants in 2005.
Porters Neck, at the time, was an underserved area. Medac’s build-ing
at 8115 Market Street is now adjacent to Wal-Mart and the busy
Bayshore Commons shopping center. However, in the early 2000s, the
area had no businesses and few homes, and was saturated with oak trees.
The company decided to take its design cues from nature.
“It was a forested site and had nice oak trees,” says Hunter Coffey,
then project architect with Kersting and now owner of his own firm in
Boone, North Carolina. “We felt bad about cutting down the trees, so I
thought maybe we could reimagine having these trees in the building.”
The firm approached the design holistically, using a forest motif in
the architecture, interiors, site and landscape.
“Our goal was to blend the distinction and blur the lines between
indoors and outdoors,” Kersting says.
The natural theme is evident inside and outside the building. Trees in front
of the building introduce the forest motif in the design. Support beams
inside resemble trunks and branches. An outside balcony overlooks trees
and a retention pond.
www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM