Designer Forum: An award-winning stadium upgrade caters to multiple needs – November 2024

By Kelly Gilreath

Seeking to enhance the sport of tennis in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, Charleston-based entrepreneur and philanthropist Ben Navarro enlisted a broad team of architects and design specialists to expand the city’s Credit One Stadium. The formerly 7,000-seat stadium is now capable of hosting over 10,000 fans and offers enhanced broadcast capabilities, allowing for greater visibility of the sport both locally and nationally. The award-winning project created a world-class player and patron experience, including a stagehouse with spaces for player amenities, broadcasting, private guest suites, a VIP club level and a player lounge. LS3P provided interior design services for an approximately 49,000-square-foot upfit, including flooring and furniture selections, art and accessories for the entire club level.

THE GROUNDWORK
LS3P provided expertise as the local associate architect for this major renovation and addition. The design team worked closely with Charleston Tennis LLC to create spaces that enhance the player and patron experience and attract premier events. The interiors team also assisted with major exterior color selections for the stadium seats, while Rossetti, a Michigan-based architecture firm, served as the stadium design architect and architect of record for the project.

When not being used for tennis, the stadium functions as a top-tier event space. Due to the nature of the space and its use, flooring material specification was an important part of the design process. Thousands of people traipse throughout during the frequent events, so the durability of products-especially the flooring-needed to be kept at the forefront of the design, ensuring that these materials would last for years to come, while also supporting an elevated visitor experience.

The entire club lounge is outfitted with porcelain tile, and the choice was made for clear reasons of durability-other flooring types were not even considered. Though area rugs or carpet islands were brainstormed to help soften the various lounge groups within the room, the design team decided against that. Due to the multifunctionality of the space, the flooring needed to be something that could take the abuse of dragging furniture and stand up to frequent spills. The team wanted something bulletproof and a little bit monolithic and seamless that could also provide patterning.

LS3P proposed two schemes for the room, one called the manicured garden and the other based on a champagne bubble. The client was drawn to the manicured-garden theme, which infuses the whole stadium with soft leafy-green colors. The team pulled that forward in the club room, giving it a sophisticated and lush, enveloping feeling. Vast windows run along the perimeter, providing views on one side of the beautiful oak trees beyond, so LS3P wanted this room to feel almost like a treehouse. The materials and patterning pull from the natural aesthetic of the Lowcountry’s Spanish moss and moody landscape. Moss-covered millwork enlivens the ceiling. A feature wall with organic elements transports the outdoors in at one end of the space.

To anchor the sense of biophilia, the team specified MileStone’s Mood Wood porcelain in Honey for the main thoroughfare of the room. It offers the essence of a natural material in a durable and easy-to-clean format, grounding the bold visual of Mosa Tile’s Core collection installed around the perimeter while simplifying the cleaning regimens and equipment required.

THE SPACE
When the elevator doors open, the first thing guests see is the Core collection’s vivid monochromatic pattern, which was extended into the atrium to immediately create a storyline. The whole stadium plays back to the essence of a tennis ball with subtle nods woven throughout via round shapes in the flooring, artwork and lighting. It’s also incorporated in how some of the spaces are laid out, providing an organic throughline without being too obvious.

Figuring out how to break up the lounge space was a big design challenge. The room sits at the end of the stadium venue, so when there are tennis events going on, it’s the premier place for viewing. The design team knew that the client wanted a bar in the room, and that it needed to be of a certain size. It’s always hard to take a vast, open space and leave room for large groups of people while also carving out areas for small, intimate moments. The floor patterning helped craft those special moments, providing the jumping-off point for how the area would be space-planned and utilized moving forward.

The Core collection’s circular graphics are large enough to visually accommodate different groupings for the various functions that will be held there without looking off-balance. MileStone’s wood-look tile came as a plank, but rather than opting for a typical offset-plank installation, the team wanted to do something that felt special and complemented Core’s geometric patterning. LS3P had the Mood Wood cut on an oversized ‘X’ grid pattern, with the planks that fall in between those Xs alternating on the 90°. It was a complicated install, but it was worth it. It took what was an everyday wood-look porcelain tile and made it feel unique to the space. Even the mosaic tiles, though a running-line offering in pre-cut shapes, were customized in terms of the colors and how they were joined together.

Having a storyline that hearkens back to the circular shape of a tennis ball, as well as a tight color palette, helps unify the space. Though there is a lot going on, the space feels very harmonious. It’s reflective of the overall nature of this project, in which so many groups came together to craft a unified vision. There is such great pride in having local talent be part of reimagining this important community space, which has drawn people from around the country and earned national recognition from the International Interior Designers Association (IIDA). The project won the 2023 IIDA Carolinas DesignWorks Best in Show award and was the winner in both the hospitality and design details categories.

Copyright 2024 Floor Focus 

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