Cathedral Village: Transforming an Active Senior Living Community Through Exterior Renovation

At Cathedral Village in Philadelphia, Klover is helping transform aging residential buildings with a new building envelope, Nichiha architectural wall panels, and a field-first approach centered on safety, quality, and respect for the residents who call the community home.

Renovating an existing building is rarely as simple as replacing what is already there. When that building is part of an active senior living community, the work requires another level of planning, coordination, safety, and care.

That is the challenge Klover is helping solve at Cathedral Village, a Presbyterian Senior Living community in Philadelphia. Internally, the project is often called PSL Cathedral Village. Klover is contracted for a phase involving Buildings G and H as part of a larger redevelopment effort that has progressed over approximately a decade.

For Klover, the goal is straightforward: help give these buildings a much-needed transformation while creating an exterior that performs better, looks better, and can serve the community for decades to come.

Modernizing an Aging Senior Living Community

The existing Cathedral Village buildings presented many of the conditions common to aging facilities. Open walkways left portions of the property exposed to weather, while areas of the exterior showed deteriorating CMU, peeling paint, cracking, rust staining, leaks, and other signs of years of exposure.

Klover's scope includes installing a new vapor barrier and Nichiha architectural wall panels, helping create a more durable and visually appealing exterior building envelope.

For Site Leader Lucas Pinsky, who has been with Klover since 2020, the difference was noticeable almost immediately.

The project team jokingly described the original building as an "ugly duckling," but the transformation began well before the finished siding went into place. Masonry repairs addressed cracks and deteriorated areas, roofing conditions were repaired, and the installation of the new weather barrier started changing the appearance and performance of the building.

Even before completion, residents were noticing the difference.

Introducing Nichiha Architectural Wall Panels to Klover's Field Team

Cathedral Village also presented Klover with an opportunity to work with a new exterior cladding system: Nichiha AWP 3030 Illumination architectural wall panels.

Nichiha architectural wall panels are a fiber cement cladding system designed for commercial exterior applications. Although Klover's field teams have experience with exterior systems including James Hardie siding and ACM panels, every cladding product has its own installation requirements.

For the Cathedral Village team, that meant learning the Nichiha installation process, understanding the required tools, developing efficient installation methods, and applying existing exterior construction experience to a new system.

That learning process began months before installation.

Because the Nichiha material carried a six-to-eight-week lead time and required a detailed submittal process, Klover initiated coordination early to protect the construction schedule. The effort brought together estimating, project management, the Nichiha representative, and the general contractor's project team to finalize quantities, technical information, pricing, approvals, and procurement.

Accurate estimating was particularly important because the normal rebid process could not be completed before the material needed to be ordered. Early collaboration allowed the panels to arrive on site with time to spare and helped position the field team for a successful installation.

Construction Safety Inside an Active Senior Living Community

Working at Cathedral Village is fundamentally different from working on an unoccupied construction site.

Residents may be only steps away from active construction.

That reality influences nearly every aspect of field operations. Work areas require additional temporary protection, safety railing, controlled access, and careful planning to separate residents from construction activities.

Dust control is particularly important when cutting fiber cement products. The Klover team uses specialized track saws and HEPA-filtered vacuum systems to help control silica dust during the installation process.

The team must also remain aware that Cathedral Village is someone's home.

Residents regularly walk near the work areas and stop to speak with Klover team members. Maintaining a safe jobsite therefore goes hand in hand with being respectful, approachable, and conscious of how construction activities affect everyday life within the community.

Solving Difficult Access and Existing-Building Conditions

Exterior renovation projects often require field teams to adapt to conditions that cannot be fully understood until work begins.

At Cathedral Village, some elevated areas could not be safely or efficiently accessed using traditional lifts. Klover's field and project management teams worked with equipment vendors to identify and acquire scaffolding suited to the building conditions.

The project has also required careful coordination with work completed during previous phases.

Materials, colors, flashing details, installation methods, and existing conditions can change over the course of a redevelopment spanning many years. Even products ordered to match earlier work can arrive with differences.

Klover's team has had to study adjacent phases, determine how new construction should transition into existing work, and make field adjustments that preserve a consistent finished appearance.

The Challenge Residents Will Never See: Construction Scheduling

Some of the most difficult work at Cathedral Village will be invisible when the project is finished.

Scheduling has been one of the project's biggest field challenges.

Klover's exterior work depends on multiple preceding and adjacent activities, including masonry repairs, excavation, roofing, glass, and window installation. Those trades do not always progress sequentially around the building. Windows, for example, may arrive based on manufacturing and delivery schedules rather than in the exact order Klover would ideally install the exterior.

That requires constant communication and flexibility.

Instead of allowing one incomplete area to stop production, the team evaluates where work can continue, coordinates around other contractors, adjusts sequencing, and keeps the project moving while maintaining installation quality.

Building Something Residents Can Enjoy for Decades

The most important measure of success at Cathedral Village will not simply be square footage installed or milestones completed.

It will be what residents experience when the construction is gone.

Klover's team understands that the exterior they are installing could remain visible for the next 40 or 50 years. That creates a different sense of responsibility for the people performing the work.

As Lucas describes it, the goal is for residents to be able to sit outside, drink their coffee, read a book, look at their surroundings, and feel good about what they see.

That perspective captures what the Cathedral Village project represents for Klover. It combines commercial exterior construction, building envelope improvements, specialty cladding installation, occupied-facility safety, field problem-solving, and detailed project coordination, but ultimately, it is about improving a place people call home.

From early material procurement to the final piece of Nichiha siding, the project demonstrates a principle Klover brings to every job: solve problems together, protect the people around the work, and get it right the first time.