Shops at Kenilworth

Shops at Kenilworth

Application: Walls

Building Type: Retail

The Kenilworth Mall, originally built in 1979, has become an iconic landmark shopping center in the upscale Towson community. The Mall was home to the Stebbens Anderson anchor store which had a strong local following until they closed their doors this past year. Stebbens Anderson celebrated 152 years in business opening right after the Civil War selling coal, lumber and hardware. In need of a major renovation, the ownership of Kenilworth hired the outstanding retail design firm JP2 Architects in Baltimore. In 2015 Chesapeake Contracting began the renovation of the newly rebranded The Shops at Kenilworth. The Shops now contains 30 stores with a very active customer base who have embraced the new mix of retail and restaurants.

The renovation started with new entrances and new cladding materials providing a very unique and interesting balance of materials and textures. The key design element was the re-skinning of punched accent elements with an elegant Parklex Copper composite HPL panel. The Parklex incorporates a beautiful “copper” tone real wood rainscreen panel in a concealed plank and exposed large panel format. The wood product, unlike print wood image panels, provide a unique grain to each plank and panel. The beautiful wood HPL skin, compliments the painted masonry to provide a fresh clean skin on the building. The Parklex High Pressure Laminate (HPL) composite panel is extremely tough, durable and graffiti resistant to excel in the heavy use applications common in retail.

The concealed 6” planks were fabricated and installed on a clip carrier rail attachment, installed over a vertical hat channel secured to the existing masonry walls. The vertical J channel provided the 1” vertical air space required to maintain the back-ventilated rainscreen design principles. The systems weigh less than 5 lbs/SF including the panels and aluminum subframing, all of which is supported by the masonry back up wall. The stair towers and a few soffit locations also incorporated an exposed fastening system in large panel format with panels up to 4’ X 8”. The fasteners are color coordinated to blend into the wood panels. In addition to the Parklex, JP2 designed a beautiful stainless steel mesh screen illuminated at night to brighten up the walkways and stair towers at night.

The Parklex Rainscreen cladding is ideal for updating older retail, where you want to bring a beautiful wood product to enhance the building elevations without demo and reconstruction. The Shops at Kenilworth lead firms, Chesapeake Contracting and JP2 Architects, were presented with the “”Award of Merit”” from the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) Excellence in Construction Awards for their work on on the project.