PROJECTS
Kolb Ranch Relocation and Rehabilitation
LOCATION: Dublin, California
CLIENT: City of Dublin, California
DATE COMPLETED: 2011
In 2007 the City of Dublin acquired a deteriorating suburban retail strip-mall at the city's historic crossroads and demolished it to create a new city park to complement neighboring historic buildings. After landscape design got underway, the owner of the Kolb Ranch in nearby Pleasanton offered to donate five historic buildings: the hay barn, the Sunday school barn, the main house, the old house, and the pump house, for relocation to the park. These ranch buildings, originally constructed in the early twentieth-century, are rare remnants of the Tri-Valley's agricultural past. They had been slated for demolition to make way for yet another new commercial office park.
Chris VerPlanck has played an important ongoing role in this project as it has unfolded over the last decade. In 2003, while he was head of the Cultural Resources Studio at Page & Turnbull, he surveyed Dublin Village and prepared several recommendations, including the redevelopment of the strip mall at the village center with a public amenity better-suited to its surrounding historic context.
In advance of the relocation of the Kolb Ranch buildings, Chris VerPlanck prepared a technical memorandum summarizing the history of the Kolb Ranch, a context statement for rural Western vernacular architecture, and general recommendations for how to site the buildings in their new location. In 2009, following upon these recommendations, Mr. VerPlanck's former architecture firm of Knapp & VerPlanck developed detailed construction drawings and specifications to guide the relocation and rehabilitation of the five historic structures moved to Dublin Historic Park. The landscape architecture was completed by the venerable firm of Royston Hanamoto Alley and Abey.
