Charlotte broke ground Oct. 8 on Firehouse 44, a $23.3 million, 14,000-square-foot station the city says will be the first mass timber firehouse in the Southeast. It’s also chasing zero-carbon certification, and at the reported cost the project works out to roughly $1,660 a square foot.
North Carolina Construction News reported the team: Samet Corp. is the design-builder and ADW Architects is the architect. The two-story, three-bay station sits on Dixie River Road in the River District, a fast-growing development on Charlotte’s west side.
What’s inside the mass timber firehouse
The city picked a mass timber structure to cut the building’s carbon footprint and leave wood exposed inside. The systems list runs longer than most municipal jobs. There’s no gas service. Heating and cooling come from geothermal HVAC with in-slab radiant heat, and a geothermal water heater is a first for a city facility. Rooftop and ground-mounted solar are sized to offset 100% of energy costs, and low-flow fixtures and ENERGY STAR equipment target a 43% cut in potable water use.
Charlotte is pursuing the International Living Future Institute’s Zero Carbon Certification and LEED Gold. Zero Carbon is the harder one. It requires a year of operating data showing the building’s energy is covered by renewables, so the city won’t know whether it earned it until well after move-in.
Why net-zero fire stations are hard
A firehouse runs around the clock. It has bunk rooms, a kitchen that never really closes, and apparatus bays with big overhead doors that open on every call while diesel exhaust has to be pulled out fast. Those bay doors are an envelope problem, and continuous occupancy makes the solar math tougher than it is for an office that empties at 6 p.m.
That’s part of why the number looks high. The $23.3 million figure is the reported project cost and likely includes design, site work and equipment. Neither the city nor the trade press broke out hard construction cost or the timber package. No completion date or timber supplier has been named.
The case for building Firehouse 44 this way
Demand isn’t in question. Crews have run more than 1,500 calls since early 2026 from a temporary station next door, a triple-wide trailer for firefighters plus a pre-engineered building for the engine. Fire Chief Reginald T. Johnson tied the new station to housing and road growth in the district.
Public owners have been the steadiest buyers of all-electric, high-performance buildings. In Brooklyn, Gilbane and Marvel finished a $128 million all-electric civic building under budget at $2,133 a square foot. And green work is concentrating among big firms, as ENR’s Top 100 Green Contractors ranking showed this month.
For Samet, a Greensboro-based builder, the job is a reference project in a region where mass timber is still rare. If Charlotte posts its first-year energy data and the station clears Zero Carbon, expect other Southeast cities to copy the spec. If it doesn’t, the $1,660-a-foot number is the one council members will remember.