Are we once again entering the “mightaswell” stage in the Houston real estate lifecycle? You know — the season for architecture firms near and far who’ve given up most hope that that bold, sorta-hush-hush, but definitively conceived-in-boom design they’ve been slaving over for the last several months will ever actually get built to come to terms with the idea that putting the pretty renderings on display for fans to gawk over what might have been isn’t such a bad consolation prize?
If so, these drawings of a 33-story residential tower on San Felipe — just west of Voss Rd., commenters on the HAIF message board figure — appear to be right on queue. They now appear in some of the new marketing materials of Dallas architects Humphreys & Partners, with no mention of a client. But a few details do come with:
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The ground floor would include a 6,350-sq.-ft. lobby and leasing center, a 5,000-sq.-ft. restaurant, and an additional 5,000 sq. ft. of retail space. The garage would fit 767 cars. And the design would feature 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom units, along with some townhomes in there somewhere.
The site is described as 3.2 acres. If the intended San Felipe location is the former shopping center site at 7703 San Felipe St. between a stub of Woodway Dr. and Buffalo Bayou and the project is indeed going hungry for funding, this would not be the first tower design for the same spot to go down in a downturn trying.
- San Felipe Tower: 33-Stories, Residential [HAIF]
- Previously on Swamplot:Â Dolce & Freddo Condo Towers on San Felipe: Left out in the Cold?; San Felipe Condominiums: Two New Towers in Memorial
Renderings: Humphreys & Partners Architects
That’s…quite the run on sentence you’ve managed to construct there.
Whether it goes up or not, you can’t deny it’s in a great location for whatever materializes there It’s Memorial villages-adjacent, walking distance from Trader Joe’s and the new Whole Foods with easy access to the Post Oak/Galleria area. Those high enough on the eastern side will get great views midtown and downtown while those on the west side will enjoy a canopy of trees stretching past the beltway.
It sucks when we reach the point where pie in the sky designs flood the internet, with little are no hope of ever coming to fruition. I like this building tho, it has a cool, elegant design. We get all these awful to mediocre buildings and the cool ones just either sit on the drawing board or worse get mutilated a la The Hotel Alassandra. Pity.
The opinions shared at HAIF regarding architecture, economics and urbanism are about as relevant and insightful in a serious, thought-out discussion as the comments of a bunch of clueless, angry, isolated, ‘special’ 4th graders discussing architecture, economics and urbanism. The Swamplot admin would be well advised to curb his obsession with that pack of born losers (except for Urbanizer, of coarse – he’s cool). Everyone else over there is a complete idiot. – dumber than Shannon and Common Sense combined – if that’s even possible.
Uh, San Felipe and Woodway run parallel to each other and do not intersect..
@cm: There’s a little stub of Woodway that does cross San Felipe. We’ve updated the text to make the location more clear. Thanks!
What? This is too rounded and curvy for Houstons boring conservative and mediocre tastes. I predict, if even built, the final product will morph into a bland, blue glass, flat topped box Houston style and all the local media design critics will call it “striking” or “groundbreaking” or some other description it obviously is not.
@God. Good thing I don’t believe in God.
Dear God, I always appreciate comments where the author…..even God him/herself…..calls so many people an idiot and then either misspells or makes a grammatical error by writing “of coarse” instead of “of course”. Hmmmmm. Guess you aren’t perfect after all! You have just destroyed my faith!
The residents of Farnham Park(Piney Point) must be pleased this is not being built.
Meh. All towers look nice in the design drawings but you have to hurt your neck to appreciate it in real life.
Agree with the comment about Shannon and commonsense. Swamplot’s resident misogynistic troll.
I find myself in agreement with God on this one. Things got really juvenile on HAIF several years back. There was always an undercurrent of that in the discussion, but it got ratcheted up to a dominant extreme on several occasions, culminating the stealthy excommunication of RedScare and I and also about 16 million of the most likely IP addresses that I might use to so much as open the HAIF homepage, which is “403 Forbidden” to me unless I use the Tor Browser or a VPN, which takes ten extra seconds.
I’ve been back to HAIF several times since then to scour for useful information. Although there exceptions among the faithful (Urbanizer was mentioned), the general tone hasn’t seemed to have improved. Its snark aside, Swamplot has developed into the better forum both for discussions and as a repository of information. Plus, thank goodness, threads don’t usually stay active long enough to go off on asinine tangents.
I’ve had to wait through three cycles – almost nine minutes – for a left turn from eastbound San Felipe to northbound Voss. When something does go up at that spot, the afternoon traffic will become epic…unless they open the gate and reconnect Woodway.
So much hate, I must be doing something right :)
If it wasn’t for me, this blog would be one step above Occupy Wallstreet nutjobs, the only difference being they lived in tents and yall live in historic (delapidated) bungalows.
@Hdtex Commonsense isn’t misogynistic. No need for that Ad Hominem attacks, Those kind of logical fallacies don’t help your case. Only a hippy liberal hipster communist man-hater/FemiNazi would argue that way.
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As for HAIF. That site sucks. There needs to be more conservative commentators on there, who fight for the cause of their political belief on a website that has little relevance to politics. Thats the way you convince people!
Please explain how I’m a Mysogynist? How exactly do you reconcile calling other trolls all the while….trolling?
TheNiche is bitter for being booted off of HAIF. Most forums have a range of users and some fly off the handle with misinformation and will take their stance to the grave. Same with the comment section here. Although Swamplot is a Mensa meeting compared to the Chronicle comments, the HAIF usually dishes out the renderings and information before Swamplot. Swamplot at the very least provides interesting articles and sources (plus a nice, cleaner layout than HAIF).
Anyways, it’s a nice filler and would certainly extend the skyline further west from San Felipe Plaza. Looks like it belongs more on Kirby though.