Current Use
When custom officials moved to the Thomas P. O'Neill building in 1986, the Custom House was declared "surplus property". On April 16, 1987, the city of Boston purchased the building from the General Services Administration. The building remained unoccupied and inaccessible for 14 years. Working with the Boston Redevelopment Authority, The Landmarks Commission and Massachusetts Historical Society, The Beal Companies and Jung/Brannen Associates, Inc. proposing concepts ranging from museums to offices to residential developments. In 1995, The Beal Companies and Marriott Ownership Resorts International announced plans to develop it into a time-share resort, with Jung Brannen Associates retained as Architects. It was converted into an 87-room Marriott Vacation Club starting in 1997.
One of the greatest challenges facing the design team was the limited square footage of usable space on each of the tower floors, and one of the primary reasons that redevelopment into modern use had posed such a problem. In order to transform the Custom House into a financially viable real estate asset for Marriott, the team had to maximize the size and number of suites that could be located in the building. Working around the tower’s structural constraints, the project team devised ways to fit four to five suites with custom-designed built-in cabinetry and furnishings, on each floor. This resulted in the creation of 87 one-bedroom suites with 22 different floor plan designs. A private owner’s lounge, an exercise area and a game room are a few of the other amenities designed into the project. Also designed into the project was significant public access: a new ground floor and rotunda-level maritime museum and exhibit space, and guided tours of the refurbished observation deck on the tower’s 26th floor.
Pressley Associates, Inc. is the landscape architecture that redesigned the front plaza in 1999 "It provides a new urban linkage space that provides a sense of cohesion between Custom House Tower, Faneuil Hall and Marketplace Center." "As part of the current rehabilitation of the Tower to hotel use, the mandate of the landscape architectural design was to unify and revitalize the urban environment while respecting the buildings' historical importance. A 1-acre (4,000 m2) plaza has been designed to encourage pedestrian access and use, and to relate contextually to the adjacent Faneuil Hall Markets and Marketplace Center through the extensive use of large caliper shade trees, brick and granite pavements, and high quality site furnishings. The scope of work provided includes site design, construction documents, approvals process, presentations, resident engineering and construction support services.
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