In two recent posts about public recreation facility design, I wrote about planning for food and beverage service and aquatics mechanical/chemical rooms. Both are common building components that often get overlooked in the early design phase. That said, while not all facilities offer food/beverage or aquatics amenities, it seems every facility always could use more storage space. So why do so many buildings fall short with storage?
After almost 30 years of designing public recreation centers, I suspect that I have yet to make a storage room large enough. I don’t believe that’s even possible. But I can at least help facility operators get off on the right foot by not losing storage space before they have it in the first place.
Inevitably, storage is the one component of a project that gets chipped away at in just about every phase, which is why it’s imperative to evaluate how much storage will be required for each individual space and then bake it into the facility’s space program. Be honest, because your space program almost never expands throughout the course of a project; the opposite usually happens. So if you don’t start off with enough storage, you’re definitely not going to end up with enough storage. Storage must be protected during the entire process.
This means taking a serious look at each space and asking how much storage it needs. How much fitness room storage do you need? How much gym space storage do you need? How much multipurpose room storage do you need? Ultimately, the best solution is to place storage rooms adjacent to (or as part of) the spaces that will use them. In other words, avoid only creating a large central storage space somewhere in the building. I’ve even visited some recreation centers in which the storage space is desperately located in the attic, accessible only by ladders.
Don’t hesitate to bring in programmers, facility maintenance staff and other stakeholders early on to help determine the maximum and minimum amounts of storage space required. From there, if storage needs to be reduced along the way, you will at least have baseline parameters within which to work.
While bulk storage spaces affiliated with large programming areas such as gymnasiums and sometimes natatoriums are easier to justify, the real challenge can come in defending storage for smaller multipurpose spaces. In those areas, having easy access to tables, chairs, exercise equipment, and data and electrical racks is vital. Those spaces need wide doors, adequate turning radiuses and perhaps two-way access — with one set of doors accessible from inside the room and another set accessible via a hallway wall. This allows staff to enter storage areas at any time, regardless of whether an activity is taking place inside the main room.
The double door on the right goes to the meeting side and a door to the corridor is on the left. Doors are both on one side of room to maximize storage space, and the corridor door allows storage to be changed among storage rooms without disturbing the meeting room.
My advice? If plans for, say, a 1,600-square-foot group exercise room with 200 square feet of dedicated storage need to be trimmed for budgetary or other reasons, the room should be downsized to 1,400 square feet instead of reducing (or even eliminating) storage space. That’s not a dramatic overall size difference, and patrons likely will be unaffected. But you will regret having given up that storage space.
It’s worth taking a cue or two from Parks & Recreation Department officials for the City of Deer Park, Texas, who remained steadfast in their commitment to building a new facility with enough storage for today and the future. The 66,000-square-foot Dow Active Complex (which, in the spirit of full disclosure, my firm designed) opened in August and has elicited “Ooos” and “Aaaahs” of envy when parks and recreation colleagues from around the state tour the facility.
A large meeting room that is divisible into up to three rooms, each with double doors leading to large storage rooms.
“From the beginning, we knew that storage space was a must,” says Jacob Zuniga, assistant director of parks and recreation for Deer Park. “After touring almost a dozen recreation centers, the feedback we constantly received was that the need for more storage was always something others wished they had done differently. So, we looked at storage as being a high priority.”
Indeed, during the design phase, plans needed to be adjusted from two buildings to one, and discussions ensued about reducing some of the initial storage spaces. But because all programming spaces were intended to be multifunctional, appropriate storage needed to be allocated. And in the end, that storage was protected.
“In the span of a day, you could have a yoga class, a lunch meeting, an after-school program and then another fitness class all in the same space,” Zuniga adds. “Being able to store tables, chairs, AV equipment, program supplies, fitness supplies and basic cleaning supplies all in one space with easy access allows us to maximize programing.”
Storage is not sexy; in fact, it joins laundry as some of the most common non-public-facing spaces that tend to get shortchanged somewhere in the middle of planning, design or even construction. The reality is that without adequate storage space, programming likely will not function properly.
I’ll give Zuniga at the Dow Active Complex the final word on this topic: “Storage is like a Swiss Army knife: The more functionally you can plan for in storage, the more effective your programming spaces will be — no matter what is going on.”
