Year: 2017
Location: Tucson, Arizona & Katy, Texas
Client: Jake Jabs – American Furniture Warehouse
Type: Industrial Scale Retail
Size: +/- 600,000 SF Retail / Distribution
Status: Tucson, Arizona – Unbuilt; Katy, Texas – Completed and Operational
Role: James Easton, AIA, NCARB, Project Architect – Conceptual Design and Development
Firm: Butler Design Group, Architect of Record

American Furniture Warehouse – Prototype Development

American Furniture Warehouse combines two very different building types within a single large-scale commercial structure: a public furniture showroom and a high-volume warehouse and distribution operation. Prototype development focused on resolving those competing requirements into a building that could be repeated across multiple markets while remaining adaptable to different sites, freeway orientations, customer circulation patterns, and local design requirements.

The showroom functions as the public face of the operation, while the majority of the building is driven by storage, receiving, distribution, loading, and customer pickup. Rather than allowing the warehouse scale to overwhelm the retail experience, the architecture concentrates identity around the primary entrance, outdoor display areas, customer pickup zones, and major freeway exposures.

A series of elevation and perspective studies explored how a consistent architectural vocabulary could be applied to an exceptionally long building. Entry towers, large-scale glazed elements, horizontal canopies, masonry and panel accents, signage fields, and changes in parapet height were used to establish hierarchy and break down the mass without disguising the fundamental economy of the structure.

The prototype also had to work operationally. Customer pickup is treated as an integral part of the building rather than a secondary loading function, while the warehouse elevations are organized around repetitive dock positions, service access, and the requirements of large-scale inventory movement. The result is an architecture developed around the way the business actually functions.

These drawings were used to study alternatives quickly and communicate them clearly to the client before committing the ideas to construction documents. Multiple entrance configurations, material palettes, signage locations, freeway elevations, and customer interfaces could be evaluated while the underlying building and operational program remained consistent.

The work reflects a broader approach to prototype architecture: establish the parts of the building that should remain constant, understand which elements must respond to each site, and develop a design language strong enough to survive repetition without making every location identical. At this scale, successful architecture depends as much on logistics, constructability, documentation, and clear communication as it does on the appearance of the finished building.

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