by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
They traded a view of the parking lot at a Baymeadows office park for one filled with City Hall, Hemming Plaza’s tree canopy and historic buildings. Everyone who works at JF Civil Engineering agrees it was a good move.
“We have really embraced Downtown,” said company founder Jim French, P.E. “It’s very convenient for us to be close to walk to the Ed Ball Building and City Hall and the Florida Theatre Building. A lot of the government agencies we work with all the time are Downtown and so are quite a few of our clients.”
French said after he graduated from the University of Florida with a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering, his was a home-based business. It wasn’t long before it outgrew the spare room so he and his wife, Kim, who is the office manager, decided to transplant the firm to Baymeadows.
After a couple of years and the addition of a couple of associates, it was time to look for an even larger space.
“We looked at houses in Springfield and Riverside thinking we might be able to find a location where we could have an office on the ground floor and live on the second floor,” said French. “One of our clients owned the Schultz Building (on Adams Street) and told us he had one floor left in the building that had not been renovated, so we decided to take a look. The property manager told us she was reluctant to even show it to us, but we explained to her that we are engineers – we see things that need a lot of work all the time.
“I remember when we stepped off the elevator on the fourth floor, the property manager was cringing. But we saw the potential immediately. Downtown won out.”
Using the same software they use for their civil engineering projects, French and his staff designed the layout of their new workspace to include a lot of open space, open ceilings and ducts, track lighting and stained concrete floors.
“An engineering firm can quickly become cluttered with plans and boards and all the things we accumulate while we’re working on a project. We wanted something with a clean look that’s easy to keep that way,” said engineering intern Joanne Diz.
The urban experience extends beyond the firm’s front door, said Kim French, who is accompanied to the office each day by “Candy,” a boxer the Frenches rescued from a shelter.
“We love to go for walks. People who normally wouldn’t talk to you stop and say hello because we have Candy with us,” she said.
Diz also said she enjoys the working environment because, “Before we moved Downtown, we didn’t know many of our business neighbors, but even though we’ve only been here for a couple of months, we know so many of our new neighbors.”
French said having an office Downtown has also offered him a couple of opportunities to do something for the environment.
“My philosophy of urban development is to build a dense urban core that puts less stress on the infrastructure,” he said. “We supported that by moving our office Downtown.
“Also, we live near Beach and University (boulevards). My wife drives our car to work every day, but it’s close enough that I can ride my bike if I want to. We walk to lunch and walk to see clients or go to apply for permits and that helps reduce our carbon footprint.”