Sixty-four-year-old developer Gary Neville has a thing for old buildings. He has restored an old hotel, and he converted a factory into a design center.

He’s been concerned about the environment for decades, too, long before the “green” movement was in vogue.

Neville has brought together those two passions in a two-story building at 724 Lincoln Blvd. in Venice. When his SolarGreen office project opens in July, the transformation of a dilapidated office development into an environmentally efficient, mixed-use commercial building will be complete.

Neville purchased the 4,600-square-foot building, which sits on a 3,500-square-foot lot, back in 1997 for $317,000. It was run down and “cockroach-ridden,” Neville said. Soon after the purchase he was able to rehabilitate the building and lease it out, but by 2001 he decided to create the SolarGreen project. He never planned on tearing the building down.

“If you have an existing building, the greenest decision you can make is to not tear it down and instead renew it,” said Neville, who cut his teeth in the real estate game by creating the Santa Monica Design Center and rehabbing the Georgian Hotel, also in Santa Monica. “That is one of the most fundamental decisions you can make.”

Green projects are typically built from the ground up, because overhauling an existing structure is far more difficult.

“I think he has been very proactive in terms of incorporating the energy efficiency measures and environmentally sound measures into his architectural design and construction,” said William Glauz, manager of solar energy development for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

The project’s most distinctive feature is the solar panel array, which adorns the roof and a side of the building. The 88 solar modules will generate about 15 kilowatts of electricity per day once the system is up and running, Neville said.

It is possible that the panels could generate enough electricity to power the entire building, he said. The Kyocera Corp. solar panel system cost $143,000, including installation.

“We don’t know if it will produce more electricity than it needs you can’t predict the fog factor,” Neville said.

Statement on the side

Neville decided to place about 20 percent of the solar panels on a side of the building, where they will receive less direct sunlight than roof-mounted units. He said his intent was to make a statement: that a green building could be visually striking as well as energy efficient.

Angie Brooks, a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-accredited architect with Pugh + Scarpa, said that mounting solar panels on the sides of buildings, once considered inefficient, is becoming more common as green building becomes more prevalent. The panels on the side of the building dress up what is an otherwise plain industrial-looking commercial building.

“A lot of people criticize these vertical panels, but when you look at actual load and number of panels you need a lot of rooftops don’t have that space,” said Brooks, a friend of Neville.

“Because we did it ourselves we kept the cost down and I wasn’t worried about the additional expense of doing something unusual,” he said.

Neville said it has cost $500,000 to renovate the building, a far cry from the millions of dollars it would cost to construct a similar building from scratch. Other features in the building include energy efficient appliances and lighting and second-floor space that could be rented out for residential uses.

Neville has hired the West L.A. office of Grubb & Ellis Co. to lease out the building’s ground floor space at between $5 and $6 per foot per month. The space could accommodate up to three tenants.

But rents in the $5 range would price the building at the very top of the office rental market. By way of comparison, the average asking rent for Class A space in Santa Monica was $5.17 for the first quarter the highest in Los Angeles County, according to Grubb & Ellis data. And many established markets, such as Beverly Hills, Brentwood and West L.A. which can offer luxury office space in well-established, marquee buildings had average asking rents in the $3 range in the first quarter.

Neville thinks the building could attract a marquee tenant who is interested in making a statement about its commitment to ecology and the environment.

“It is good business to start thinking about a building like this,” he said.