Dahlin Group's Architects Leading Major Local Projects
Custom Development, Transit-Oriented Design Feature Strongly for Sunset, Coyote Valley

Dahlin Group president Doug Dahlin in the company’s new 27,000 square  foot headquarters, which is adjacent to the BART station.

By Scott Eldredge
Special to NETWORK

Dahlin Group Architecture and Planning is presently engaged in two significant projects that involve nearly all of its services—custom home design, community and recreational facilities, single and multifamily residential housing, commercial buildings, and urban planning and design. In collaboration with Sunset and Popular Science magazines, Dahlin Group is designing Sunset's 2006 "House of Innovation: Ideas for Now and the Future." And for the city of San Jose, Dahlin is leading the design of a more than 7,000-acre urban community in Coyote Valley south of the city.

The House of Innovation, scheduled to open September 8, will combine Sunset's philosophy of indoor/outdoor California living with advanced technologies and green building features from Popular Science. Sunset has sponsored its House of the Future since 1998, creating homes throughout the West as a showcase for innovative architecture, construction, landscaping, and home products.

Sunset chose Dahlin Group to design the home with them for a custom lot in Alamo and lead the group that also includes De Mattei Construction, McDonald & Moore interior design, NUVIS Landscape Architecture & Planning, and Pro Home Systems for home technology. In its nearly 30 years in the Bay Area, Dahlin Group has built more than 200,000 homes, many of them custom designs. A selection of its custom homes can be seen on its website at www.dahlingroup.com. Information on the House of the Innovation can be obtained from www.sunset.com.

South of San Jose in the Coyote Valley are over 7,000 acres of land that were held in reserve for urban development for more than 40 years. The city selected Dahlin Group to create a plan for a second city center on the site consisting of 25,000 residential units and a minimum of 50,000 high tech jobs.

Dahlin Group's overall goal is to create a sustainable community, one that by design will maximize the pedestrian nature of the urban center while avoiding many of the problems associated with urban sprawl—inefficient land use and a lack of schools, recreation, and transit to support the people who live and work in an area.

Central to the plan is a transit-oriented design that features a new Cal-Train station and a bus rapid transit (BRT) system running in a central loop. The BRT system will have an exclusive right of way and use busses that can intelligently control traffic signals. Such systems have increased frequency, capacity, and speed over standard bus transit.

"Everyone will live within a quarter mile of the stops on the BRT loop," explains Doug Dahlin, president, "The project is built to a higher density than we've built in the past, but the additional density is meant to preserve the surrounding open spaces. Everyone will be within a mile of the open space hills on both sides of the project."

Dahlin Group has followed its own tenets by completing a move in May to a new transit-oriented location in Hacienda. "As urban designers committed to the concept of transit, this was an important move for us, to put our money where our beliefs are," Dahlin says. The company spent a year converting the old Farmer's Insurance building at 5865 Owens Drive near the Pleasanton BART station into a new 27,000 square foot headquarters for Dahlin Group.

Creativeworks Brings Big Agency Experience to Hacienda
Ad Agency Provides Madison Avenue Know-How with a Personal Touch

Sheldon Schachter and Carol Dickinson opened Creativeworks in 2001 and expanded into their Hacienda offices in January.

By Scott Eldredge
Special to NETWORK

Creativeworks, a full service advertising and marketing agency located at 5990 Stoneridge Drive in Hacienda, offers a range of services and depth of talent that belies its seven-person size. Co-owners Sheldon Schachter, creative director, and Carol Dickinson, head of marketing and account services, combine experience working for Fortune 500 clients on large accounts with an understanding of the needs of companies of the Tri-Valley area.

Schachter and Dickinson learned the business in the advertising centers of Detroit and New York, working in product categories as diverse as automotive, healthcare, package goods, and finance for clients as large as the Ford Motor Company and Procter and Gamble. Schachter has earned the advertising industry's highest award, a Gold Lion from Cannes, and numerous Clio awards for his creative work. Dickinson's broad background includes extensive experience in the therapeutic healthcare and pharmaceutical areas.

Schachter came to California when he was recruited to be the creative director of the marketing department of World Savings and Loan, the nation's second-largest S&L. In 2001 he and Dickinson opened their own agency in San Ramon, and in January, they moved Creativeworks to a larger space in Pleasanton.

Now working with small and medium-sized companies, the two principals find that their big agency, large account experiences gives them a unique perspective.

"Our clients want hands-on experience in the brands and categories they're in, which we can provide," says Schachter. "For any client who walks in the door, our goal is to generate foot traffic, inquiries, make the phone ring—the bottom line for them is the bottom line. But we also bring our Madison Avenue training and background—the full range of creative thinking and strategic marketing, and because we've been there and done it all, we can do things easier and faster."

"But we don't automatically apply approaches that we learned in a big agency," stresses Dickinson. " A company like Johnson & Johnson may not suffer much if one brand is not profitable, but to people with small and medium-size businesses, this is a critical problem—they're trying to stay afloat, or differentiate themselves. We've learned how to be a lot more efficient and creative—we think harder."

The agency also works with companies who just want a change, and companies with some experience with advertising and marketing who want another agency on tap for a fresh look or new approach. "We are a resource they are familiar with," says Schachter, "in terms of working with people who are up to speed immediately, who know where they are going and how to get there."

"In a lot of ways, we reflect the business environment here in Hacienda," says Dickinson. "There are a lot of experienced people here, people who learned their craft while working for larger corporations and came up with alternate ideas for their own companies. We cut our teeth the same way, so we understand. Some of the people we've had the opportunity to work with here have presented some significant marketing challenges to us, and I think we've been able to meet them."

Creativeworks is happy to share what they know and welcomes walk-in inquiries.