The Calvin at Coolidge Corner

The Calvin at Coolidge Corner

Brookline, MA

The Calvin in Brookline’s Coolidge Corner is a five-story, 42,000 SF mixed-use building featuring 25 residential units ranging from studio to three bedrooms, with five of the units set aside as affordable housing (40B). Amenities include bicycle parking, a shared outdoor landscaped patio, common space, and an underground parking garage with 24 spaces. The podium-style building also features a retail space on the first floor occupied by Tatte Bakery & Cafe, Remax, and PrimeLending.

A three-story commercial building was demolished in the spring of 2018 to make way for the new mixed-use building. Located on a tight urban lot at the corner of Fuller Street and Harvard Street, the building sits across from a busy municipal parking lot and is adjacent to a single-family home and a kosher grocery store. Kaplan performed structural modifications to the store to accommodate the new below-grade parking garage.

The main design objective was to seamlessly integrate the strong language of a ground floor retail presence with large spans of storefront glazing and sidewalk awnings which presently line both sides of Harvard Street. The ground floor of the building, designed to a zero lot line condition at both Harvard and Fuller Streets, strongly defines the urban edge while the residential portion of the building above steps back and away from the street. The residential massing is softened with mixed cladding textures and expressed bay windows paying homage to the residential nature of the building’s upper mass, while the brick and glass textures at the building’s base are familiar to the context and scale of the neighborhood.

Construction was completed in February 2020.