If you own an asphalt company, don’t plan on working in downtown Lake Bluff.
That appears to be the verdict of about 30 residents and business owners who took part in a vision exercise at village hall last week. The exercise aimed to figure out resident and business preferences for development in two blocks of downtown.
The attendees wandered around the room putting red and green stickers on boards with photos of sign types, parking options, parks, building facades, building placement and building scale.
A photo of asphalt parking resembled a case of the measles, with disapproving red stickers all over it. Likewise for photos of contemporary building facades. Gary Lawrence of Lawrence Interiors was one of the people who didn’t care for a contemporary look.
Lawrence said he favors Georgian-style buildings and mixed-used construction, with residences above and stores below.
Lawrence operates his business out of a 1926 Georgian-style building, a contributing building in Lake Bluff’s Uptown Commercial Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Victoria Lidstrom, who recently moved herself to Lake Bluff and is in the process of moving her business there too, has similar tastes.
The look she prefers is “charming, like we’re in England on a cobble-stoned street,” Lidstrom said.
The vision exercise evolved from the village’s land use plan of 1997, said Village Administrator Drew Irvin. The exercise focused the block bordered by North, Oak, Scranton and Walnut avenues and the block bordered by North, Oak, Scranton and Evanston avenues.
“It’s to facilitate development if it comes and to incent development,” Irvin told attendees.
For those who didn’t attend the event but still want to weigh in on potential development, the city has a link to a survey on its website, http://www.lakebluff.org available until July 31. After tabulating the results, the village will hold another community meeting in the late summer or in the fall, said Jodi Mariano, an architect with the design firm Teska Associates Inc., which was hired by the village to run the downtown visioning project.