Sacramento businessman James Cameron Jr. is turning a historic bank building into a palatial corporate headquarters complete with a rooftop garden, 17th-century fountain, climate-controlled greenhouse and a glass-sided “observatory” overlooking downtown.
The restoration and expansion of the building is of a quality that Sacramento has rarely, if ever, seen during the last half of this century.
Project architect Dennis Greenbaum said he has never worked on something so elaborate. “There aren’t too many clients who are willing to do something like this; this is a real special thing.”
Cameron, intends to use the 82-year-old D.O. Mills Bank building as a private headquarters for his merchant banking firm, Cameron & Associates, and some of the businesses it has invested in. Cameron declined to comment, saying he wanted to preserve his privacy.
Cameron made his mark in the local business community with Occupational- Urgent Care Health Systems, or OUCH, a company he founded in 1982, took public, and sold in 1991 in a deal reportedly worth $400 million. Sources say Cameron personally made anywhere from $30 million to $60 million on the sale.
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Last year, Cameron led a group that acquired a controlling interest in 3Net Systems Inc., a financially struggling medical software firm based in Rancho Cordova.
Acquaintances said Cameron, a lawyer, has been involved in various businesses, and is now trying to export medical equipment to the former Soviet Union. But his biggest success to date came with OUCH, which he built into a firm with 350 employees.
“He’s an entrepreneur; he gambled and invested his earnings and sweat into (OUCH), and it paid off,” said Bill Kristoff, a West Sacramento city council member and longtime friend of Cameron’s.
Cameron is apparently sparing no expense to renovate the neoclassical D.O. Mills building, believed to have been designed by well-known Bay Area architect Willis Polk.
The rooftop garden is paved with limestone and marble tiles imported from France. Its iron trellises and railings were designed by Greenbaum and two other architects and were built by a company in Utah. The garden has two fountains, one built in India in the 1600s and the other carved by a Los Angeles artist from a historical model.
“It’s supposed to be like a formal European garden from the turn of the century, something that would have been done at the time the building was built,” Greenbaum said.
A marble staircase encased in glass winds up from the garden to the observatory, which will have glass walls on three sides, a limestone floor and a marble fireplace.
The existing fifth-floor penthouse, which contains an ornate mahogany- paneled boardroom and the former bank president’s offices, has been resurfaced with handmade terra cotta.
Cameron has put a new marble floor in the boardroom. The penthouse offices are being completely revamped, with much attention paid to recreating historic-looking detail, down to the custom-carved brass hinges on every door. Greenbaum said Cameron intends to spruce up the lower floors of the former bank as well.
“He loves the building,” Greenbaum said.
Greenbaum said he doesn’t know how much the renovation project will cost. But Dick Hastings, the planner in charge of the city’s Design and Preservation Division, which reviewed the design, said the materials being used are of “extremely high quality all the way through.”
“It’s not an inexpensive project at all,” he said.
Cameron bought the building in January 1993 from local developer Gregg Lukenbill for about $3 million, according to county records. Lukenbill purchased the building for about $1.5 million in 1990 and spent about $800,000 on renovations himself.