The building near Richmond, Va., sports gracious white columns outside, gilded mirrors and brass sconces inside and looks a bit like George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Self storage — in this case, Mount Vernon Self Storage — has never looked so good.
Rather than building a storage center that simply passes muster with local planning and zoning boards, many developers are making architectural statements. Developer George McCord’s facilities in South Carolina appear to be antebellum plantations. Westy Storage Centers in Connecticut and New York look like museums or luxury hotels.
Westy centers boast lobbies with granite floors, 40-foot-high ceilings and walls lined with Picasso and Monet reproductions. Stainless-steel elevators are custom-made, as are the polished railings. Balconies, indoor landscaping, piped classical music and natural light from floor-to-ceiling windows complete the picture. Employees at the Westy centers wear uniforms.
“We have had requests to have wedding receptions in our lobbies,” says Caesar Arredondo, managing member of Arredondo & Co., the Stamford, Conn., developer of the Westy storage centers. “We want a country-club look,” Mr. Arredondo says. “This is an establishment.” (To the disappointment of brides, it remains strictly a storage establishment.)
It is a far cry from the first self-storage centers, which were usually no-frills, taste-deficient boxy structures, often located in out-of-the-way places. Why, then, the leap to pseudo mansions and museums?
“Owners are trying to better position their stores to have a retail, user-friendly appearance in order to differentiate their centers, to make them stand out,” says Sydney James Chiswell, president of Chiswell & Associates LLC, a self-storage consulting firm based in Lake Monticello, Va.
There is also the female factor. Developers say women, who make up about 70 percent of the industry’s customers, were uncomfortable going to the off-the-beaten-path eyesores of yesteryear and hesitant to store anything of value in such premises.
Linda Weiss of Stamford, Conn., tells how times have changed. “I consider this a place where you would put your good things, not just your bad things,” Weiss says of a Westy Storage Center in Norwalk, Conn. She and her husband even feel comfortable storing their Passover dishes there.
“It’s bright and clean and just so much more welcoming,” Weiss says. “They have professional attendants waiting to help you, as opposed to you asking a question and them telling you to go to the filling station and find Fred, the guy with the crowbar.”
Another sign of the good-taste trend: Entries for the Facility of the Year award held by trade magazine Mini-Storage Messenger totaled more than 150 in 2001, up from fewer than 50 the year before. “It’s no longer the ugly stepsister at the ball,” says Michael R. Kidd, executive director of the Self Storage Association, a trade group based in Springfield, Va.
Looks matter to Wayne Ross, of Bluffton, S.C., who stores wine at Mr. McCord’s Plantation Self Storage in Bluffton. He says the difference between a storage center that looks like a plantation and a run-of-the-mill facility is “like walking into a house that’s worth $500,000 and a house worth $100,000 — it’s that much difference.”
Ross says he patronizes Plantation Self Storage because he likes the “nice looking” lawns and landscaping and because the center recreates the feeling of an old plantation while being modern and new.
Gracious storage can come at a premium. The average asking rent for a 10-foot-by-10-foot unit in a state-of-the-art storage facility in a metropolitan area cost $199 a month last year compared with $124 for a “regular” facility, according to Charles R. Wilson & Associates Inc., a Pasadena, Calif., appraiser of self-storage facilities. But the disparity doesn’t always hold true: In more affluent neighborhoods, the regular facilities and the state-of-the-art centers tend to cost about the same.
Aside from space, new storage centers are adding amenities and services on the order of conference rooms and booths for corporate customers to make phone calls, fax, or use a computer, and lounges featuring cookies and coffee. Some have call centers for customer queries that operate around the clock.
Shurgard Storage Centers Inc. of Seattle, has been rolling out 24-hour touch-screen kiosks at its storage centers where customers can conduct storage-related business any time they want. Many owners now rent trucks for their storage customers.
Retail and office space in these centers has expanded over the years to an average of 1,000 square feet from about 400 square feet, according to Chiswell & Associates, as has the array of merchandise on sale, which now includes packing materials such as boxes, tape and Magic Markers.
The industry’s main advertising venue is the Yellow Pages. Public Storage Inc. of Glendale, Calif., the largest owner of self-storage facilities in the country, with 1,384 facilities in 37 states, has run ads on national network television, but only a few other storage companies have used TV, and those that have appeared on local or cable stations.
In the end, the selling point that sways the would-be self storer to the new-style facility seems to be the exterior. “We have made a conscious effort to elevate the design of the self-storage facility to a much higher level,” says Bruce Jordan, principal of Jordan Architects Inc., a full service architectural firm in San Clemente, Calif. Self storage represents about 70 percent of the firm’s business.
“Ten years from now,” Jordan says, “you can drive by one of these and it will remain a very classy facility, nicely landscaped, integrated into the community and a handsome building.”
