In the Works
Follow along with our blog as we walk you through a typical day in the life on our jobsites and showcase the projects we’re currently building across San Diego and beyond.
From showroom to service drive: rebuilding Lexus San Diego without closing the doors
Lexus San Diego needed a full renovation and expansion without ever closing the showroom or service drive. Here’s how we sequenced the phased construction to keep the dealership running the entire time.
A few months ago, we wrapped up one of our favorite projects for another one of our amazing clients! Every Davis & Adams project moves through the same lifecycle — pre-construction, design & bidding, construction, closeout, and post-occupancy — and today we’ll use this one to show what that actually looks like on the ground. The $14.5 million redevelopment of Kearny Mesa Lexus put all five stages to the test on a site that never got to close for business, and it’s the construction stage where the real complexity showed up: instead of running as one continuous build, it split into three phases running side by side.
Pre-construction and design & bidding happened together, before a single wall came down. As design-build contractor, we coordinated the architectural, structural, civil, and MEP disciplines ourselves and built the phasing plan around one constraint everything else had to answer to: customers, staff, and service operations kept moving the entire time. That plan is what turned a 25,000-square-foot renovation into three parallel phases instead of one sequential build.
Phase 1 — Showroom & Customer Experience ($5M). An 8,823-square-foot renovation of the showroom and customer facilities: new framing, ceilings, finishes, lighting, power, plumbing, and HVAC, plus a modernized façade and site improvements.
Phase 2 — Service Operations Expansion ($7.8M). 11,897 square feet of new service area, a 4,389-square-foot service canopy, and renovation of 4,414 square feet of existing service facilities. This was the largest and most logistically complex phase, built while technicians kept working underneath it.
Phase 3 — Business & Delivery ($1.7M). Renovated business and service reception areas, updated employee facilities, and a new 874-square-foot vehicle delivery canopy — the finishing touches that tie the customer experience together, from arrival to delivery.
Closeout meant inspections, systems commissioning, and punch walks across three separate scopes instead of one. And post-occupancy looked less like a wrap-up and more like business as usual — because for Lexus San Diego, it never stopped being business as usual. Twenty-five thousand square feet, three phases, two years, zero days closed. That’s the lifecycle in practice: five stages on paper, with construction alone splitting into three running at once, on a site that stayed open the entire time.
