CODE Building – C-VILLE Weekly

Eye of the Tiger

When attorney David Sutton purchased a small Charlottesville oil supplier on the verge of going out of business in 1982, the company had just two trucks to its name—and one had dry-rotted tires. But over the past four decades, Tiger Fuel Company has grown to become one of the largest petroleum distributors in the state. In addition to selling fuel to businesses and homeowners in Virginia and neighboring states, the company runs nearly a dozen gas stations, convenience stores, and car washes across central Virginia.

Last year, the family-owned business made a surprising pivot: It acquired Charlottesville-based solar company Altenergy.

“I’d been wanting to do solar at some of our facilities for a really long time, and had some good friends in the industry who were advising me on that,” says Tiger Fuel President Gordon Sutton. “For years and years, they [said] you could do it just for the feel-good reasons, but it doesn’t make a ton of financial sense. But about three or four years ago, they let me know that had absolutely changed.”

In 2018, Tiger Fuel hired Altenergy to install solar panels at its Preston Avenue and Ruckersville stores. Because the two companies had worked well together, Sutton decided to pursue a partnership, creating the petroleum distributor’s newest branch, Tiger Solar.

Tiger Fuel is now working to bring solar power to the rest of its convenience stores and bulk plants, and will use it for all future real estate projects. It’s also installed electric vehicle charging stations at its Mill Creek store, and plans to add them to more locations.

By transitioning to solar power, the company ultimately aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2025.

“It’s no question that the fossil fuel landscape is changing,” says Sutton. “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”—Brielle Entzminger

‘What’s going on in there?’

Strolling along the Downtown Mall these days will lead you past the quaint restaurants and boutiques that have long been associated with the pedestrian drag. But in some corners, that small business entrepreneurial spirit has taken on a more cutting-edge sheen. Icarus sells custom-made knee braces from its sleek office space near the corner of First and East Main streets. Closer to the mall’s east end Skooma opened last year, promising a “boutique” dispensary experience as full marijuana legalization approaches. Its Apple Store-esque decor strikes an entirely different note than the head shops of yore.

Dave Johnson, founder of Icarus, holds one of the company’s knee braces outside his downtown office. Photo: Eze Amos

Meanwhile, though plenty of traditional office space still occupies the mall’s nooks and crannies, multiple companies have set up trendy co-working spaces, where individuals or small groups can purchase more flexible access to office space. In addition to hosting larger tenants, the CODE Building houses the Codebase co-working space, which could support as many as 200 workers. Vault Virginia, also downtown, rents conference rooms, suites, and a la carte access to individuals and companies alike. And Common House, on West Market Street, offers membership-based entry to its coffee-shop-vibe multipurpose rooms. The times they are a-changin’.—Ben Hitchcock

If you build it…

Charlottesville’s innovators have had an effect on the city’s skyline in recent years. As the area becomes more and more of a hub for entrepreneurship and the tech industry, all those new employees need workspace, and that’s led to major new developments geared toward office space.

WillowTree has been in to its facility in the old Woolen Mills warehouse since last year. The Charlottesville-based software development firm has worked on digital products for big companies like HBO and McDonald’s, and also put together UVA’s COVIDwise app last year. The corp is very much in the process of pitching Charlottesville as a destination for entrepreneurship: “The future of tech innovation? It’s not where you think,” reads WillowTree’s website, above a picture of its new Woolen Mills campus. Checkmate, Palo Alto.

Closer to downtown, Apex Clean Energy has recently moved in to new digs, too. Apex is a renewable energy company, which organizes and operates solar and wind farms across the country. It has projects close to home, as well: last year, then-Governor Ralph Northam announced that the state would buy the output from Virginia’s first onshore wind turbine farm, operated by Apex and located in Botetourt County. The company’s shiny eight-story Garrett Street office building is made of sustainably harvested massed timber, a construction method that limits carbon emissions. Apex says it’s the tallest timber building on the East Coast.

Then, of course, there’s the CODE Building, which now looms at the Downtown Mall’s west end. The state-of-the-art tech tower opened late last year. The building’s upper floors will be rented to large companies—Jaffray Woodriff’s Quantitative Investment Management has already claimed one, and local wealth management firm Investure has moved in to another. In total, the building could bring as many as 600 workers to the mall.—Ben Hitchcock

Mission driven

Charity Malia Dinko has always had a passion for helping people. After immigrating to the United States from Ghana in 2010, she started sending money back to her hometown village of Worikambo as soon as she landed her first jobs at Walmart and McDonald’s. Making minimum wage, Dinko began to feel like she was not making much of a difference, but soon had a shift in perspective.

Charity Malia Dinko has created opportunities for women in Ghana through her shea butter business. Photo: John Robinson

“One day I was driving to work, and at the stoplight there was a homeless man begging for money. I only had 25 cents in my car…but God just spoke to me and told me you should give that money to him because that money could add up,” says Dinko. “It got me thinking…whatever it is I can save up and send to my mom, it will help something. It’s better than nothing.”

After earning her associate’s degree, Dinko transferred to the University of Virginia in 2016. She created a micro-loans program to help people in Ghana start their own businesses, but faced challenges keeping it running. While taking classes for her minor in social entrepreneurship, Dinko realized she could start her own business, selling what millions of exploited Ghanian women were already making: shea butter. In 2018, Dinko officially launched Northshea, which pays women in Worikambo a living wage to produce shea butter. Since then, the company has lifted many out of poverty, as well as built a library in the village and sent school supplies to children there.

“The northern part of Ghana is one of the poorest areas…Many [women] don’t have jobs at all, and they’re migrating to the south and [most] end up being abused,” says Dinko. “What we’re doing here is allowing the people to stay home by creating jobs right there.”

In addition to selling raw shea butter from her facility in Ghana, Dinko uses the raw butter to make a variety of whipped body butters with essential oils. Northshea’s products are currently sold at Darling, Rebecca’s Natural Foods, and The Elderberry, as well as on the company’s website.

As her company grows, Dinko plans to improve the schools and health care in Worikambo. And soon, she hopes to get her shea butter on shelves in big-name stores, like Target—the bigger the business gets, the more she’ll be able to give back.—Brielle Entzminger

From the seventh-floor balcony of the CODE Building, downtown Charlottesville stretches out in front of you, misty blue mountains visible in the distance. Up here, North Downtown’s brick buildings, with their shingled roofs and quaint steeples, look like Monopoly pieces. And the seventh floor isn’t even the top of the office tower—two more floors of shimmering windows and black concrete rise above.

After years of construction, the place is just about open for business. Tenants are arranging their desk chairs, and the lobby’s coffee shop—Millisecond, an offshoot of Milli Coffee Roasters—is pouring joe as of this week. The caramel-hued foyer looks like the lobby of a high-end boutique hotel, with Bauhaus-style lamps hanging over leather couches. Before long, anywhere from 400 to 600 finance and tech workers will move in.

“The idea is that you have food, and sources of good energy, in the courtyard and also interior to the space,” says Rob Archer, who’s in charge of the co-working area on the building’s two bottom floors. The building itself—the Center of Developing Entrepreneurs, CODE for short—is the brainchild of mega-rich hedge fund manager and UVA alum Jaffray Woodriff. (The building’s general manager, Bill Chapman, is a co-owner of this paper.) The complex aims to “become the nexus of commercial and social enterprise activity in central Virginia,” according to the building’s website.

CODE sits at the end of the Downtown Mall, where the ice rink and Ante Room music venue used to be. The building’s floor plan is an irregular A-shape, drawn so that the tall office tower would be situated on Water Street. A triangular courtyard opens on to the mall. The architects went to great lengths to keep the original brick facade of the Carytown Tobacco building in place at the courtyard’s corner, though they painted the old bricks white with black trim, a sleek scheme to match the rest of the complex.

The new tech hub has aesthetic pedigree. Thomasin Foshay, who coordinated the building’s interior design, points out the courtyard fountain, designed by a member of the team that built the memorial at Ground Zero in New York; the rooftop garden terraces were installed with consultation from someone who designed the High Line in Manhattan. A dangling 21-foot interior sculpture, designed by an apprentice of Frank Gehry, lights up at night, offering passersby a glimpse of luminous floating polyhedrons through the window.

In the building’s red-carpeted, 200-seat theater, more bells and whistles become apparent. The chairs are “slim profile jump seats,” says Foshay. At first glance, each seat looks impossibly thin, but unfolds to create a two-part chair. When it’s time to divide the theater from the entryway, a partition appears from behind a hidden panel in the wooden-slatted wall.

“This is an amenity for tenants, co-working members, and also the community,” Archer says of the theater. The next event on the calendar is a holiday party for CAV Angels, a UVA alumni group of angel investors.

The building’s first two levels are dedicated to Codebase, the open-concept office space that allows members to buy access at a variety of tiers. At midday on a Monday, three or four people with computers sit here and there, plugging away. “What we’ve seen so far is that people are here, and they’re being extremely productive,” says Archer, a tech entrepreneur, UVA lecturer, and owner of Arch’s Frozen Yogurt. “That’s the whole point.”

A single individual can fork over $250 a month for 9 to 5 access to the office space, plus amenities like a kitchen, showers and a podcast studio. A four-person private office—with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out towards the Omni—goes for around $2,500. Twenty of the 38 offices are leased so far, and the co-working space could ultimately support as many as 200 people.

“In this space in particular, the pandemic has actually been an accelerator,” says Archer, citing companies’ desire for flexibility. The minimum membership period is two months.

Meeting spaces of various sizes are accessible from the co-working floor. “We call this a huddle room,” Archer says, opening the door to a green-walled space with a table and chairs. “But it’s really a conference room.”

Besides the lingo, other little hints of the entrepreneurial spirit are everywhere. In one conference room, ornate black and gold wallpaper shows vines curling around coffee cups and cell phones. One early tenant has hung a portrait of HGTV’s Property Brothers on their glass-walled office. Even the mailboxes have a touchscreen—you’ll need a QR code emailed to you to get your packages.

The building was designed to facilitate “collision,” says Andrew Boninti, a lead developer on the project. Central to that mission is the retail on the ground floor. Two restaurant spaces open into the courtyard: Ooey Gooey Crispy, which bills itself as a “grown-up grilled cheese” shop, is on the way, as is a storefront for organic Mexican fusion food truck Farmacy.

Will the restaurants be enough to draw passersby into the orbit of the looming building? “We like the concept that people understand that it is private property,” Boninti says, “that people are here on invitation. But that’s what we’re all about—collision of ideas. People running in to each other.”

The higher floors, four through nine, are designed as more standard office space for large companies. So far, three of the six floors are leased, with Woodriff’s firm, Quantitative Investment Management, taking floor four. Investure, a local financial planning and investment company, is fully moved in to floor five. Floors six through eight remain unclaimed, though Boninti says at least one more deal is imminent.

The pandemic has made large tenants a little hesitant to jump in. “They don’t know what they’re coming back to,” he says. “‘Are we gonna do three days a week at home?’ and all of that. I would think before the pandemic we would have had all of the spaces taken.”

Down at the bottom of the building, in the underground parking lot, 10 glowing green electric car chargers hang in front of the rows of spaces. (None of the 15 or so cars parked at the moment are plugged in.) Other environmentally conscious features include a rainwater collection system that catches water and pumps it back to the plants on the terraces. An elaborate air filtration network ensures that fresh air is always being blown in to every space—an expensive feature, but one Woodriff insisted on, citing research that fresh air boosts cognitive function.

Initially, Woodriff didn’t want to install a parking lot at all, says Boninti—“He thinks the future is going to be less cars, public transportation, and Ubers and everything else”—but the building has room for 74 cars, enough for the tenants’ bigwigs. “We have secured a lot of off-site parking,” says Boninti. “We have 100 spots at the Water Street garage, we have spots at the Omni, we have spots across the street at Staples.”

Most people, however, will encounter the building on foot, as they stroll down the mall. Amid two-story, red-brick storefronts filled with boutiques, restaurants, and used bookstores, the shiny, black, angular CODE building sticks out.

When Archer learns that C-VILLE asked about the building in its question of the week (p. 33), and one of the respondents said it reminded them of the Death Star, he says: “How do you respond to that? You don’t. You just say ‘hey, you’re entitled to your opinion. We love you, come check us out if you get a chance, the coffee’s good.’”