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An upscale Austin apartment building enjoys a hotel-style makeover.

By Steve Aust

For rental-property owners, the market has become increasingly competitive. Even amidst economic challenges, historically low financing rates provide strong impetus to forego renting for homeownership. And, to attract young professionals who prefer or choose to rent their dwellings, property owners increasingly take bold measures to make their properties desirable – to the point where they sometimes offer aesthetic amenities that appear more befitting to a hotel.

When Zom, an Orlando, FL-based, property-management company
with more than 40 upscale apartment properties in Texas and Florida, opened the Monarch in Austin, its leaders understood the importance of strong branding and amenities appropriate for a city that’s become an epicenter for “the creative class” – a term coined by author Richard Florida to describe those who work in the arts, technology and other “gray matter” disciplines.

Seeking a holistic design and development approach for the Monarch, Zom commissioned RTKL to execute its architecture, interior design and environmental graphics. Three RTKL offices collaborated on the project; its Los Angeles branch coordinated the wayfinding, signage and environmental-graphic design. According to Cody Clark, the principal of RTKL’s Los Angeles office, the design team aimed to create a space inspired by the concept of “transformational living.”

Clark said, “The annual monarch-butterfly migration through the area became our muse. We saw an opportunity to seamlessly integrate large-scale graphics into the architecture and surrounding streetscape to reinforce the overall brand. We had the luxury of collaborating closely with the architectural, interior-design and sign-fabrication teams to ensure a seamless transition of material, form and color.”

RTKL hired Austin-based FSG Signtech to produce the property’s signage and environmental graphics. (FSG Signtech simultaneously fabricated this and two other projects for RTKL) Because the garage looms closest to the street, RTKL specified a unique graphic treatment for its exterior – a stylized pattern of the markings on a monarch butterfly’s wings. The shop applied digitally printed graphics to pre-cut aluminum panels supplied by the garage’s builder.

“For our past digital graphics, we simply subbed out the jobs,” Jim Beckett, FSG Sign Tech’s account executive who worked on the project, said. “But, given the sheer volume of work we fabricated for RTKL, it made sense to bring printing inhouse. We purchased an HP DesignJet 8000.”

The most unique challenge of this segment was matching RTKL’s specified orange. According to Beckett, orange is consistently the most difficult digital-printing color to match and required meticulous proofing. However, once they’d successfully matched the color, he said adhering the 3M Controltac film to the panels proved relatively simple. Installers affixed the graphics to the garage façade using pre-drilled holes and countersunk screws. To create graphics for the garage interior, FSG Sign Tech printed digital graphics using 3M’s IJ8624 rough-surface film and 8524 luster-finish overlaminate.

Rounding out the program, the shop produced the façade’s exterior channel letters and icon using 0.080-in. aluminum cut on the shop’s MultiCam 3000 and Gerber Sabre routers and illuminated with halo-lit, white neon. The shop also applied digital graphics to interior-illuminated pillars that help guide vehicular traffic.