BEACHWOOD, Ohio — In a special meeting held Tuesday (Sept. 20), the city’s Planning & Zoning Commission approved, with three minor stipulations, preliminary site plans for construction of the Porsche of Beachwood dealership.
In January, the dealership’s owners, Penske Automotive Group, went before City Council with plans to move the business from its current address, 25855 Chagrin Blvd., to the former site of the Marriott Fairfield Inn, 3750 Orange Place. Penske, through lawyer John Monroe, stated that it had outgrown its current location.
Penske needed council’s permission to build anew on Orange Place because car dealerships are not permitted, under the city’s zoning code, to operate anywhere other than Chagrin Boulevard. Penske has had the Fairfield Inn buildings demolished.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Monroe, for the Commission’s benefit, asked Penske representative Jeff Anderson a series of questions about what is planned for the Orange Place site. Anderson said that the new building would stand two floors high and include showrooms on both floors, with the upper floor being visible from I-271. The building will have two main entrances, one facing Orange Place, and another facing I-271 to the west.
The new Porsche site borders the Bob Evans Restaurant, 3700 Orange Place, which is to the north.
The new building, at 34 feet in height, will measure just over 57,000 square feet and the site will include a second building for auto detailing that would occupy a little more than 6,600 square feet. Like the Chagrin Boulevard building, the new Porsche building will have a glass facade with silver above the glass and red lettering.
Lawyer John Monroe, left, and Penske Automotive Group representative Jeff Anderson speak to the Beachwood Planning & Zoning Commission.
“We’re going to have an area dedicated to electric, plug-in vehicles,” Anderson said. “Porsche has a proprietary charger that’s the largest charger of anybody on the market and it can charge a car in 20 minutes, roughly. So it’s a huge battery bank and we’ll have those here for our customers to charge their cars, and we’ll have additional chargers on top of that for our needs, for cars in service or cars that arrive on car carriers.”
Anderson said those car carriers would make their way to the dealership site from Harvard Road.
The new facility will employ all LED lights. The exterior lighting, Anderson said, would not spill over onto the Bob Evans property or the Hampton Inn property to the south. During non-business hours, the lights will automatically dim to 50-percent power to save energy and costs.
The new building, to be constructed on the 6.5-acre property, will be built, roughly, on the same footprint as the former Fairfield Inn.
“All the doors (for cars) we’re going to put in are high-speed doors,” Anderson said. “So they’re up in about three seconds and down in about three seconds.” He said that the doors will be closed at all times. Porsche will have the ability to park about 400 cars on the site.
Of the overall plan, Anderson said, “Obviously we want this facility to look first class. We want it to be representative of what we already have in Beachwood, but a step better and nicer and more modern, and have room to operate, which we really don’t have today.”
As a bonus for Beachwood, the Penske Automotive Group plans to bring an additional 35 accounting jobs to the city.
“On the second floor of this building we’re going to relocate our accounting office for the whole Cleveland metro area,” Anderson said. Those jobs, he said, are now located at Mercedes-Benz of Bedford, 18122 Rockside Road.
The Commission gave the preliminary site plans unanimous approval., providing three stipulations are met. City Planner George Smerigan recommended approval of the plans with stipulations regarding setbacks and a variance for parking space depths. Building Commissioner William Griswold and City Engineer Joseph Ciuni also recommended approval of the preliminary plans.
Anderson said he hopes that final plans will be ready for review in 30-45 days. City Council will vote on the preliminary plans at its first meeting in October.
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