NORTHAMPTON — More housing is planned for the neighborhoods around Hawley Street, with site plan for three condominium buildings containing a total of eight housing units unanimously approved by the Planning Board earlier this month.
The condominiums will be located at 111 Hawley St., formerly the site of the Shu-Fix shoe repair shop that now operates in a nearby building. The old building on the site will be torn down to make way for the new condos, which total 20,910 square feet to take up most of the nearly 24,000 square-foot property. The project is led by Norwich Properties, a limited liability company in Easthampton.
Doug Serrill, a landscape architect with the Berkshire Design Group, presented the project on behalf of Norwich during the Planning Board’s June 12 meeting. He stated that one building would be two stories and contain four total units, while the other two would be three-story, two-unit buildings.
“Each unit has a single-car garage, so parking would be one stall in a garage and one stall in the adjacent driveway,” Serrill said, noting there was an additional four extra spaces for a total of 20 parking spaces proposed for the property. “There are no bicycle racks proposed in here because all the units have garages, and we would be asking the residents to store their bicycles inside their units.”
There would be no centralized dumpster on the site, as the garages also enable each unit to have its own waste and recycling, Serrill said. In keeping with city ordinances, all units are to be fully electric.
The building design is in the townhouse style, according to architect Scott Laidlaw of Bonham & Douglas, who also presented before the board. The buildings’ design was inspired by row houses located on nearby Eastern Avenue, Laidlaw said.
“We were influenced by the character of the neighborhood, the types of buildings, and that helped inform what design we came up with,” he said. “We used front porches and front stoops to help enliven the sidewalk and the streetscape, and really retain the idea that this is a residential neighborhood.”
The project is one of two ongoing plans in Northampton to increase the housing capacity in the area around Hawley Street. It joins a planned five-story, 54-unit apartment building at the corner of Phillips Place and Hawley Street, to be built by the O’Connell Development Group of Holyoke. That project has garnered controversy from nearby residents concerned about the building’s size and congestion from additional parking and whether it matches the character of the neighborhood.
Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.
