It will take 225 truck trips, but in about a month luxury stone and tile maker Walker Zanger Inc. plans to be settled into its new built-to-suit headquarters in North Hills. The company is moving from a Sun Valley location that has been its home base for nearly 30 years into 126,000 square feet at 16719 Schoenborn St. The firm searched for almost four years before it signed a 10-year lease with landlord and developer Geringer Capital of Beverly Hills a year ago. The deal is valued at around $14.7 million, or roughly 97 cents a square foot a month. Walker Zanger invested $2.5 million to design and configure its new space, putting in 25,000 square feet of offices, a photo studio and a product showroom, along with a warehouse operation that includes an indoor crane, said Pat Petrocelli, chief operating officer. “Everybody’s really excited,” he said, adding that 92 employees – including administrative, design and sales staff as well as warehouse workers – will make the move from Sun Valley. The company has leased space there since 1989 and currently occupies 100,000 square feet spread across two buildings at 8963 Bradley Ave. The old property is in a heavy industrial area, which is not ideal for showroom visitors. “It’s not convenient for our clients on the Westside to get here and it’s time to consolidate into one building,” Petrocelli said. It was not easy finding appropriate space in the Valley, where the company wanted to remain, given that it needed to combine a warehouse distribution center and showroom with its corporate headquarters. The new building will accommodate multiple uses and has the required 32-foot-high ceiling clearance to accommodate the company’s extensive stone and tile inventory, Petrocelli said. Over the years, the company has done work on many high-profile projects, including the Getty Villa in Malibu. But in 1997, the firm hit the jackpot, supplying all the stone and tile in guest rooms and common areas for the ritzy Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. More recently, the company completed work on the Park Hyatt Hotel in New York. The business employs more than 200 people in three distribution centers and 15 showrooms across the country, with 250 dealers that sell its wide variety of high-end tiles. STEM Cubed What could be the first high school in the country offering a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) curriculum specifically targeted for autistic students will open its doors this month in Valley Glen. The Stem3 (“Stem Cubed”) Academy is taking 5,000 square feet at 6455 Coldwater Canyon Ave., where it will share a campus with the existing Summit View School. Both schools, along with eight others in Los Angeles County serving 1,700 students, are operated by The Help Group, a nonprofit educational agency founded in 1975. It contracts with the Los Angeles Unified School District to educate students who have a variety of special needs, including learning disabilities and developmental delays. The idea for an autism-focused STEM school for grades 9-12 grew out of an award-winning robotics team that Ellis Crasnow, director of STEM education for the Help Group, formed when he was principal at Village Glen School, which serves high-functioning autistic students, including those with Asperger’s syndrome. The eight team members were named rookie all-stars in an international competition and went to the world championships in St. Louis last year, he said. “We were all absolutely thrilled to compete at that level,” said Crasnow. “These kids are computer nuts, they like messing with computers, they like digital art, they like to take things apart.” In fact, studies show that college students with autism gravitate to STEM-related majors and have natural abilities that favor those fields. “All of the things people used to mention as negatives with autism – a narrow perception, fixed focus, repetition – are real advantages in STEM disciplines. We’ve got some extraordinarily bright kids with social issues and delays, but they are cognitively extremely capable,” Crasnow said. As director of Stem3, he will provide accelerated academics at a level typically found only in charter and magnet schools or large public high schools, he said. And as far as he knows, the school will be the first of its kind. “We haven’t found any other school in the country combining STEM with special needs,” he said. STEM3 Academy will officially open its doors to a class of 35 students; it has a capacity for 98 total. Staff reporter Karen E. Klein can be reached at (818) 316-3123 or at [email protected].
