Building a Big Flex Car Wash in Texas
One hour southeast of downtown Houston lies the City of Galveston. Boarding on the Gulf of Mexico, this historical coastal city hosts Texas’ largest seaport and the Houston metro area’s main beach and tourist destination. First settled in 1816 by the famous pirates Jean Lafitte and Louis-Michel Aury, the city is rich in history and culture and a major contributor to the long-term development of the state of Texas. With its excellent location at the mouth of a huge natural harbor, the city grew rapidly throughout the 1800’s, quickly becoming the center for all trade in Texas. By 1900 Galveston was the second richest city per capita in the entire United States. It was even dubbed the “Wall Street of the South” due to its flourishing banking industry and its position as a major center of international trade. Also famous as a major resort city, Galveston was known as the “Sin City of the Gulf” and the number one place to go for partying, gambling and prostitution prior to the rise of Las Vegas.
Throughout the years Galveston has had its ups-and-downs, surviving numerous major hurricanes, economic downturns, and other natural and man-made disasters, but it is a city that has persevered over the years, both proud of its historical past and always looking towards the future. Today the city has a population of just over 53,000… not an enormous figure, but it hosts over 8 million tourists every year. Most of these are from nearby Houston driving to the beach for the day or for weekend stays, and most in their own vehicles. After a day at the beach and driving around in salt-filled air, cars need to be washed, which brings us to the subject of this story.
Near the southern end of the US I-45 bridge across Galveston Bay over to Houston are four car dealerships in a row: Honda, Chevrolet, Toyota and Ford. All are owned by the same company, Classic Autoplex GM. Next to the Honda dealership at the northern end was the Ron Hoover Marine Center, a major small boat sales dealer. Located on a large corner lot with direct access to the adjacent highway at an overpass, it is an excellent site for opening a business with great street visibility and easy ingress/egress. When the boat dealership closed permanently during the Covid era, Classic Autoplex seized the opportunity and bought the property. Their concept was to develop a professional flex car wash facility for both their dealerships’ needs and as a business to service the general public, especially the thousands of cars coming to the beach every weekend.
Developing the site into a large car wash facility was the brainchild of Howie Bentley, head of Classic Autoplex GM. In the car business since 1997, his group saw an opportunity to expand their business model to include a car wash that could meet the needs of a wide variety of customers. This would include express services (exterior-only washes and free-vacuums), full-service (including car sales prep), waxing/detailing, and even hand-washing for over-sized trucks and high-end luxury cars. Their idea was to consolidate all of their car washing, detailing and prep work at all four dealerships into a single large facility, and then open it up to the public. All car sales would include an introductory wash membership for a number of months when they purchase new or preowned vehicles. They see “customer service” as their top priority as a company… so building an incredible cutting-edge car wash facility will further enhance their overall customer experience and keep them coming back again-and-again in the future.
With the site purchased, the business model and direction established, and the existing buildings and sitework scheduled for demolition, Howie’s next step was to select a good car wash equipment company to work with. Upon a recommendation from a good friend, he contacted Rider Wash Systems (Belanger) in San Antonio. They in turn recommended our design firm, Car-Wash-Architect.com located in South Florida. Having designed 500+ car washes throughout the country over the last 30 years, including some 50+ in Texas alone, we specialize in exactly the type of large flex wash projects that Howie wanted to build. Rider knew our firm’s capabilities and quality of work well since we developed three large car wash projects together there in Texas in the last several years. Once we discussed the new project with Howie and received input from Rider Wash Systems, we understood the design direction and the specific requirements of what Howie wanted to achieve. The following sections will discuss the design process and challenges involved.
SITE DESIGN
The site selected for the new wash project is a large corner lot on the north bound frontage road (aka Broadway Street) of US I-45 and Harborside Drive. It is adjacent to an overpass at the extreme western end of Galveston near the highway bridge leading over to the mainland and to the city of Houston. The property had originally been a large retail center selling small speed boats but had gone out of business. Located directly next to and behind the “Classic Honda” auto dealership, the L-shaped 3.06 acre parcel was slightly larger than required for the new car wash project, so the tail section behind the dealership was given to them to allow future expansion. This left a trapezoid-shaped 2.49 acre property at the corner intersection for the car wash facility, a near-perfect size (206 feet wide by an average of 400 feet in length) for comfortably laying out a large flex-style wash with few design limitations. With multiple existing entries/exits onto Broadway Street and over to Harborside Drive, the site possessed great ingress/egress allowing our design team a lot of flexibility and ensuring great traffic flow throughout the site. The owner also wanted us to design a cross-access road connection to the north Honda entry/exit road to allow easy access between the wash and all four dealership properties. This new driveway was easy to achieve since they owned both properties and it just required a revised survey to make it legal. Another very great aspect of the selected site was it possessed very small building and landscaping set-backs requirements. There also were no utility easements located on the property, allowing us to maximize the full potential of the property.
The final site design we arrived at was near perfect. We first eliminated the entry/exit road to Broadway Street, then placed a perimeter driveway around the entire site connecting the entry/exit road at the Honda dealership to the two remaining entry/exit roads to Harborside Drive. This new perimeter driveway also allowed direct access to the employee parking spaces on side of the property, and back to the stacking lanes and full service/detailing center in the rear. With this achieved, we positioned the main car wash building to be very close to the property line abutting the Honda dealership and then moved it as far forward as possible to allow great visibility from the adjacent highway and the frontage road. We utilized a variation of our famous “Racetrack” system to design the angled free-vacuum spaces in order to maximize traffic flow and improve customer satisfaction, as well as restrict the use of vacuums by non-paying customers. Our team then designed two large Detail Shelters, each mirroring the other with a driveway down the middle. This results in a very economical and space-saving layout, while enhancing detailing operations and the management of employees. The final item of the site design was locating the three POS pay lanes and stacking lanes at the rear of the property with a more than adequate 29 vehicle stacking capacity.
When the site design was finally completed, we soon ran into some major issues that threatened the viability of the project. First, once the new topographical survey was completed, we discovered that the property was much lower in elevation than expected… only +6’-6” above sea level at the property lines and averaging only around +8’-0” at the center of the site. The minimum code requirement for finished floor elevations in that area was +14’-0” above sea level, so a great deal of earth and rock fill would have to be trucked in to build it up, a major added expense to the development costs. We resolved that by stepping the site down since only the enclosed areas of the building had to be at that elevation, and the rest at much lower levels. Second, the code demanded that the site be able to retain all rainfall on the site, and that the retention areas could only be underground. This meant a very large network of interconnected underground precast concrete vaults, even more expensive than the earth and rock fill. This was only partially resolved by the project civil engineer who worked with the city’s engineering department to find solutions to lower the required capacity. A perfect solution was not achieved, but it reduced costs sufficiently for the project to proceed.
BUILDING DESIGN
With the car wash site layout completed, the next big item on our agenda was the design of the car wash building itself, as well as the two large detail shelters. All three of these buildings had to be co-located and designed to function together well. This will make management much easier and lower the number of employees required to operate the wash effectively. Functionality of design is always paramount in car wash projects and key to ensuring an efficient and highly successful wash. However making the building highly attractive with lots of friendly eye-candy and pleasing paint colors is just as important to attract customers and provide the proper ambiance. The trick is to balance these two often conflicting design paths in a way that compliments the other without compromising the final completed design. This specific project was a little more complicated since it had a total of three buildings for us to design with all three needing to compliment each other in both appearance and functionality. We also needed them all to fit in the space we had available without reducing the free-vacuum spaces. Luckily, being a large site, we had sufficient space to achieve it.
Starting with the Wash Building, we worked with Rider Wash Systems and determined that a 130 foot long conveyor was the appropriate length to utilize on this site. Our office finds this length to be the most efficient and cost-effective possible to use for most full-size washes, perfectly balancing the number of vehicles washed per hour compared to the development costs involved. Since the project is located in a major hurricane-prone area, we placed the entire conveyor trench and dual correlators inside the building to keep it safe during storms, and we used precast concrete panels for the main roof. The Equipment Room is sized perfectly at 10’-0” in width and some 65’-4” in length, and a good-sized Storage Room for storing more expensive spare parts and tools was also added. Being a “Flex” wash we provided a good-sized Customer Lobby that can handle up to 15 people comfortably. This connects to a Hallway leading to the two Restrooms, the exterior entry door, and to the Control Room, the heart and soul of the wash. Over the years our design team has perfected the layout and functionality of Control Rooms, maximizing the space so that every single square foot counts with no wasted space. In this room we combined a great office work area with two computer terminal stations, a built-in meeting/lunch table that can seat up to 5 people, and an employee breakroom with full kitchen cabinets microwave and refrigerator… and we do all of this in a room only 18’-6” by 14’-0”. The room possesses great visibility on three sides with big windows and a glass storefront door leading into the Wash Tunnel. It is an incredible workspace for managers and employees, and a vast departure from the grimy little offices you typically find in most washes, new or old.
We approached the basic design of the two Detail Shelters differently, making them as functional as possible while trying to keep the costs down, and still able to handle hurricane-level winds. Our concept was to utilize a strong tube steel structural frame and a PBR metal roof system to handle hurricane winds. With the rather limited area allotted for the two Shelters, our team was able to fit in a total of seven full-service/detailing bays along with two hand-wash bays for oversized trucks and high-end sports vehicles. We also had to include in the design a large Towel Cleaning room that can also store a large amount of cleaning chemicals, towels and other detailing materials, and an adjacent employee restroom. Overall a highly effective design on a rather small footprint that fits perfectly into the “nautical/island” theme of the project.
Being located on a barrier island along the Gulf of Mexico, the owner wisely selected an “island theme” for the wash, thus the name “Island Style Car Wash” and providing our design team the precise design direction to follow. That theme influenced the exterior façade design, paint colors chosen, and the type of landscaping to best represent the theme (i.e. palm trees). Instead of going in a more “rustic tropical island” direction, our design team went for a more sophisticated “clean modern nautical look”. We kept the building walls clean and simple with a 2” wide scored stucco pattern and painted bands of white and light gray. We installed a large 2-step flat molding on the parapet walls painted dark blue and steel blue. The metal roofs (Tower and two Detail Shelters) are also painted the same dark blue to help tie the entire design together.
The main focal point of the entire design is the large Tower at the front of the Wash Building. Continuing with the nautical theme, we made half of it shaped like a giant windsurfer sail on the sides with the gently sloped roof overhang extending way out in the front of the building and two feet out on the sides. This design gives the Tower a sense of motion, like a ship moving forward on the sea. We covered all sides and the soffit with fiber cement siding resembling cedar wood planks, again like a ship. The other lower parts of the Tower are finished in painted stucco with dark blue molding at the top and bottom. Wall signs are installed on three sides of the Tower between the painted molding.
The finished Tower design rising over an oasis of palm trees and other tropical foliage should be quite striking to behold and should quickly become an “architectural Icon” in Galveston, especially since it will be the first major building visitors see when arriving on the island, and the last they will see when leaving. This car wash project is currently in the City of Galveston building department and should be ready to start construction soon. The project is scheduled to be completed in September of 2025.
Christopher Crawford is with Car-Wash-Architect.com, the Leader in Professional Car Wash Design. He has written more than a dozen feature articles for this magazine concerning the design and construction of car washes projects. You can visit his company’s website for more information about the services they offer, or call them directly at (561) 212-3364.