A lot of thought goes into branding a new apartment or office building
In theory, the name of the building you live or work in should make sense. It might be named for its location, with its street address. It might take its name from its neighborhood. Or it could be named for a person, either a famous person or a less famous one. (Or for two people. The Kennedy-Warren apartments are named after the two men who developed it.)
In theory, a building should have a name you can figure out.
Of course, the thing about theories is, they don’t actually have to pan out. They’re theories! Which is how you can end up with Theory, the name of a new apartment building near Union Market in Northeast Washington. The building’s website exhorts: “Step into THEORY, a new residential frontier that redefines what it means to live with purpose.”
I don’t think I understand anything in that sentence, but what I’m really stumped by is the name. And once I noticed Theory, I started noticing other unusual building names. There’s an office building at 14th and L streets NW that just emerged from a multiyear renovation with a new name: the Aleck. And over in Shaw there’s an apartment building called Intersect at O.
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Whatever happened to the Watergate or 1133 15th Street?
“This is a debate we go through constantly for our projects,” said Richard Lake, managing partner of Roadside Development, creators of Intersect at O. “I love addresses personally. I’d rather just do an address. I guess the marketplace likes to have an identity. Branding is kind of critical.”
In the case of Intersect at O, said Lake, the name is meant to evoke the building’s connection to the neighborhood’s amenities, including the historic O Street Market, which now houses a Giant, and to Shaw’s cultural and culinary offerings.
A mile away is the Aleck, the full name of which is the Aleck at 1400 L.
“We’ve had a lot of thought as to how we want to position ourselves,” said Tanya Graves, senior vice president of marketing at the Meridian Group, the office building’s owners. “We definitely value creative branding.”
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What had been a 1980s office building recently got a complete makeover, with a fresh skin of glittering glass and a new atrium. It needed a name to match.
“When you give a building a name — a personality — you can build a campaign around it,” Graves said. “We wanted to dig deep into the roots and the history of the area.”
The team discovered that Alexander Graham Bell once had a laboratory at 1325 L Street NW. In 1880 he transmitted a message over a beam of light to that lab from atop the nearby Franklin School. This was the first wireless telephone message.
“We thought that was super interesting,” Graves said. “[Bell] embraced everything we wanted this building to be. He was an innovator, an inventor. … He really changed history in so many ways. It’s something we wanted this building to do.”
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Okay, but “the Aleck”?
“Aleck,” Graves said, was the nickname bestowed on Bell as a child. It’s what his family and friends called him.
“We loved the story,” she said.
Aleck Bell had a lot of theories in his life. I wonder what he would have made of an apartment building named Theory — not the Theory, just Theory.
“An apartment community is a combination of the physical building and the experience,” Melanie Flaherty, senior vice president of marketing at Carmel Partners, Theory’s owner, wrote to me in an email. “Each project is unique, and we develop a brand positioning to match the local market and our goal is for the physical building to convey that positioning.”
In the case of Theory, they wanted the name to convey “a new way of urban living,” with lots of amenities and a setting as a creative hub with easy access to Union Market, Union Station and the NoMa Metro.
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I told Flaherty that my difficulty is with the name’s nebulousness. A building is tangible — bricks and mortar! A theory isn’t.
“Names evoke a feeling that isn’t always literal,” she wrote. “By definition, Theory is a constraint which may or may not be true.”
And my rent check may or may not bounce!
It’s clear that a lot of thought goes into this stuff.
“It’s an interesting process,” said Intersect at O’s Lake. His company also developed the former Federal National Mortgage Association campus on Wisconsin Avenue NW that’s known today as City Ridge.
“That really came from our conversation with our landscape architect,” Lake said. “He said, ‘You know, the site sits on a ridge.’”
Someone suggested naming the project the Ridge, but Lake thought that sounded like the title of a horror movie.
“That kind of scared me,” he said. “If you call it the Ridgeline, that’s a vehicle.”
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A Honda, as it happens.
So City Ridge it was.
Lake said the hope is that whatever a building’s name, people will eventually focus on what it offers, not what it’s called.
He’ll soon be going through the process all over again with a parcel in Silver Spring his company just bought. It includes the old Tastee Diner.
Surely, there’s plenty of, um, food for thought there. The Menu? The Special? The Steak and Eggs?
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