Photo courtesy of Columbia Construction
Shaun Lover
President, Columbia Construction Co.
Age: 47
Industry experience: 29 years
Pivoting to Greater Boston’s next growth sectors has sustained Columbia Construction during a century of activity in the region’s building industry. Named after the road in Dorchester where it opened its first office in 1925, Columbia started out building triple-deckers in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood. In the 1970s, it shifted to a focus on the region’s health care and hospitality sector, before establishing a presence in the life science sector during the recent lab construction boom.
Despite the downturn in many building sectors, the North Reading-based company had $505 million worth of billings in 2024, establishing a new high-water mark in revenues. President Shaun Lover has led the company’s growth since being named to his post in 2017, and its crews can be seen working on prominent local projects including updates to the International Place office towers’ lobby and renovations to the Sheraton Boston Hotel in Back Bay.
Q: What’s the newest wrinkle in technology that you’re using on job sites?
A: We have a drone department, and it’s actually been super helpful with thermal imaging and 3D analysis of soil and piles. It’s helpful for hard-to-reach places, whether it’s hospitals or academic buildings or science and technology, or to do a roof analysis to see if there’s water infiltration. It’s hard to get accurate as-built drawings for the older buildings. It’s useful for soil analysis, when you’re trying to blast or reuse material. We are certainly exploring the AI world and how that can be helpful. A lot of it is administration and contract reviews, but that is something we are staying on top of.
Q: How much has the labor shortage eased from the peak of the building boom?
A: There are sectors that are slow. Residential is struggling to get going. Developers can’t get deals to work. There are subcontractors and tradespeople that are hungry. We are looking at what’s around, but we are in a good spot.
Q: How do you pick up the slack from the downturn in lab construction?
A: We’re still working for some of the big biopharmas, so that is still carrying us, and a lot of the hospitals are still upgrading and renovating emergency rooms. We have some corporate clients that are doing projects.
Q: What are Columbia’s biggest current projects?
A: Our biggest project is a biomanufacturing facility in Portsmouth, New Hampshire for Lonza, a Vertex partnership. They are very hopeful that the facility will produce material that will cure Type 1 diabetes. That’s a $160 million project at Pease Tradeport. We have an 800-room renovation at the Sheraton in Boston, and are in preconstruction on Cell Signaling Technology’s new headquarters in Manchester-by-the-Sea. We’re adding manufacturing space to Ken’s Foods in Marlborough.
Columbia Construction’s projects include the second phase of updates to the International Place office tower, including additional seating, a 55-foot-tall water feature and raised planting beds in the IP Commons. Photo courtesy of Columbia Construction
Q: How are projects being affected by the new energy codes and limits on fossil-fuel building systems?
A: We have seen an uptick in people trying to get permits to beat certain codes. That’s definitely at the forefront of preconstruction, the timeliness. What’s happening in Boston is with good intentions, but it’s adding costs, which is making some of these projects harder to build.
Q: What are the most active reuse and repositioning project types?
A: We’ve looked at a lot of buildings for conversions from office to residential. It’s a challenge to make some of these buildings work in the Financial District. The geometry of a lot of those buildings doesn’t work. A quarter of our work is changing uses, from office to lab, or warehouse to storage.
Q: What is Columbia doing to commemorate its centennial year?
A: We are providing time off for volunteering, so people can take two days of vacation for every day they volunteer at a philanthropy of their choice. We’re having a spouse-and-significant-others event in the fall for a big celebration internally. We have a couple of client events as well.
Q: As a construction executive, what keeps you up at night?
A: What’s keeping me up right now is the potential impacts on the [National Institutes of Health] funding. If you look at the list, Massachusetts is the largest recipient per capita in the country. Almost every major science, technology, research and academic client relies on it. It’s going to be an impact until we figure out where that settles out, for sure.
Lover’s Five Favorite Vacations with Family
- Yellowstone National Park
- Alaska
- Yosemite National Park
- Washington, D.C.
- Berlin, Germany
