Galleria

Galleria
04/02/08 8:17am

Rove Through Houston, Appreciating Europe

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Hotels, Restaurants
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Karl Rove(?) in the Lobby of the Hotel Granduca, Houston

So a lot of Houstonians don’t really get the Hotel Granduca. Who does? During a recent visit, the proprietor of Houston restaurant blog Tasty Bits came up with one answer:

I was always curious about the people who pay $1,300 a night for a hotel suite in Houston. Who are they? What do they eat? I got my answer as soon as I arrived and saw Karl Rove waiting to get picked up in the lobby (sulfur, smoke, instant drop in temperature, and all). For a split second I thought about inviting him to join us for lunch. It’s not often you are in the presence of one of the more diabolical political minds of our generation.

Tasty Bits has more juicy commentary on the hotel:

Entering Hotel Granduca is a little like following the rabbit hole – just beyond the iron gates and right past the horse mounted statue of Adalberto Malatesta Granduca of Monfallito (?) is a different world than one might find in otherwise sensible Houston.

After the jump: What’s down that rabbit hole! Plus: tasteful commentary on lunch at the hotel’s Ristorante Cavour.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Apartments
03/28/08 11:34am

Borlenghi: Houstonians Unclear on the European Concept

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Commercial Real Estate, Development Strategy, Galleria, Hotels, Mixed Use, Parking, Real Estate Marketing, Retail, Shopping Centers
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Arturo’s Uptown Italiano Restaurant in Uptown Park, Houston

Interfin Companies president Giorgio Borlenghi, who developed Uptown Park and the Hotel Granduca, explains how it’s done:

. . . developers must not forget the principles we Houstonians like so much such as ease of access to the various components of the building and plentiful and readily available parking. As an example, when we planned Uptown Park, we decided to keep it exclusively retail to allow our patrons to park directly in front of the shops and restaurants without having to deal with multistory parking structures.

Keeping Uptown Park “exclusively retail,” of course, meant that his luxury hotel had to go across the street:

I created Hotel Granduca as a unique, elegant and extremely exclusive boutique hotel for the Uptown/Galleria area. I wanted it to be very different from all the other hotels: It had to feel very Italian, of course, and to have a true residential setting, so that it could be someone’s home away from home. What surprises me is that a number of people in Houston are still not understanding this very European concept and somehow think that Granduca is not a regular hotel, but some type of apartment building.

Photo of Arturo’s Uptown Italiano restaurant in Uptown Park: Flickr user heyjebbo

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Commercial Real Estate
02/26/08 4:31pm

New West Loop Tower: Keeping the Uptown Office Market Up to Date

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Development Strategy, Galleria, Green Design and Development, Highrises, Houston Architects, New Construction, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments
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According to a report by Jennifer Dawson in the Houston Business Journal,, the first new spec office building built in the Galleria area in more than 25 years will be . . . a 20-story tower that was designed 15 years ago!

In the early 1990s, [Novati Group CEO Ken] Moczulski ran Transworld Properties, a developer of office, industrial and multifamily properties. Transworld owned the land at 1600 West Loop South at that time, and commissioned Ziegler Cooper Architects to design an office for the site.

“We had planned a building,” recalls Moczulski. “It was all designed.”

The economy turned south, he says, so the facility did not get built. . . .

Last year, Novati co-founders Moczulski and Fernando De León start looking in the Galleria area for an office development site. Moczulski approached Landry’s about buying the West Loop land because, as in the 1990s, he still thinks the location and high visibility make it a good site for an office building.

To top it off, Novati is saving months of development time by dusting off the original plans from Ziegler Cooper. The only design changes needed are those to make the 475,000-square-foot structure eligible for certification as a green building.

Hey, maybe it’s one of those towers that kinda looks like a tall glass cylinder is bulging out from the center? That was a hot nineties look, wasn’t it?

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Commercial Real Estate
02/26/08 8:36am

Whole Foods, Fast Foods, and the Titan

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Condos, Development Strategy, Galleria, Highrises, New Construction: Residential, Proposed Developments, Restaurants, Retail
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Still from Video of The Titan, Randall Davis’s Proposed Condo Tower on Post Oak Blvd., Uptown, Houston

If you’re looking for clues to help you figure out what the McDonald’s on Post Oak is gonna look like when it gets rebuilt, the flashy new website for the Titan doesn’t help much. There’s a video that shows Randall Davis’s latest theme-heavy condo tower from all sorts of dramatic angles, but it never answers the question most of us have been asking since the project was announced last fall: How, exactly, is the drive-thru gonna fit next door?

Davis told the Houston Business Journal last September that the new McDonald’s would be a “long, skinny building” facing Post Oak, between the Titan and the new Alexan Post Oak apartments directly to the north. In the new video, though, there are no Golden Arches, and camera angles artfully block the most direct views of that portion of the building site.

There’s no mention of the McDonald’s on the Titan website. There is, however, a welcome second confirmation that another fine food establishment will be built down the street at Boulevard Place:

A newly planned Whole Foods Market, only half a block away, places hard to find gourmet items at your fingertips.

Okay, so it’s just advertising copy. But it’s recent!

After the jump, more views of the Titan — none of which show where the real Big Macs are gonna live.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Condos
02/21/08 4:48pm

The Titan: Uptown Theme Blender

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Galleria, Highrises, New Construction: Residential, Proposed Developments, Real Estate Marketing
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Penthouse View, Randall Davis’s Proposed Titan Condo Highrise, Post Oak Blvd., Uptown Houston

All the condos in Randall Davis’s new Titan condo tower on Post Oak will be named after . . . industry titans! Get it? On the 18th floor, for example, you’ll have units named after J. Paul Getty, Coco Chanel, Pablo Picasso, and . . . Bill Gates! Now that’s a party. Floor 14? More people of brilliance, though a few of them might not actually get along so well with each other: Frank Sinatra, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Rudolph Valentino, Steven Spielberg. Isn’t that clever?

It gets better: The Brin/Page is . . . a two-bedroom! Strangely, the Buffet has a Kitchen and Dining Room that are separated from the rest of the unit’s living space. And the three-bedroom penthouse named after Mies van der Rohe — whose neighbors are of course Rupert Murdoch and Neil Armstrong — has a Great Room with a curved wall in it, and is connected to the Entry Foyer by a long hallway.

One unit on floors 23 and 24 is simply named The Titan. But there’s no reason for Randall Davis to be so bashful — he really ought to go ahead and name it after himself. Is there anyone else in Houston who even comes close to his stature in the themed-condo market?

The Titan is a break from Davis’s earlier projects, though — because it seems to have so many different themes! Put all those architects, movie stars, musicians, Silicon Valley insiders, oilmen, and suicidal novelists together in a tower styled vaguely like a comic-book rocketship, add in Michelangelo’s sculpture of David as the naked brochure-and-website coverboy, and you’ve got the Titan’s winning marketing formula! A bit confused? Sure. But if anyone can mix all this stuff up and make it work, it’s Randall Davis.

After the jump, floorplans that prove what we all know already: Designing a great building is just like planning a great dinner party that includes a few famous dead people!

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Commercial Real Estate
02/21/08 10:34am

Uptown Whole Foods: Still on Track, Apparently

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Galleria, Leasing, Proposed Developments, Real Estate Marketing, Retail, Shopping Centers
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View of Proposed New Galleria Whole Foods at Blvd Place at Former Eatzi’s Site

It may not count as confirmation exactly, but we now at least have repetition — from two separate sources — that the new Whole Foods Market our readers have been worrying about will in fact be coming to the Galleria area.

The first source is the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff, who — after interviewing Boulevard Place developer Ed Wulfe — states that a new Whole Foods will be the anchor of Wulfe & Co.’s new mixed-use development on Post Oak Blvd. . . . though it won’t open until 2010.

The second source is . . . a little unusual. We’ll tell you about it in our next an upcoming post.

Update, 2/26/08: That second source.

Boulevard Place Whole Foods image: DMJM H&N

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Commercial Real Estate
02/15/08 8:35am

Uptown Hot Potato: Four Quick Flips in a Few Short Months

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Galleria, Highrises, Land Prices, Land Sales
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That parking lot at the corner of Richmond and Post Oak, where the Steak & Ale and Mason Jar used to be? Very popular:

In 2007, Houston-based Hines Interests LP sold 9.4 acres to Rich Oak Properties LLC, an affiliate of Boymelgreen Developers LLC of New York. Sources put the purchase price at $86 per square foot, or roughly $33 million . . .

Rich Oak ultimately opted out of building on the site and chose to sell the entire 9.4 acres.

On Dec. 21, 2007, the land was acquired by Lasco/Hicks Ventures Ltd. Sources estimate the purchase price was $140 per square foot, or roughly $57 million.

A $24 million profit? Not bad for a few months’ work. And they said the days of the Houston land flip were over!

On the same day, Lasco/Hicks flipped six acres to Elegant Development Group Inc. The buyer is affiliated with Elegant Development and Investment Inc., a Houston-based construction services company that does commercial and residential work . . .

Less than two weeks later, Elegant Development flipped the six acres to Deyaar Development.

Deyaar Development is based in Dubai, and likes tall towers.

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Commercial Real Estate
02/13/08 11:27am

Is Whole Foods Coming to Boulevard Place . . . or Not?

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Galleria, Leasing, Proposed Developments, Real Estate Marketing, Retail, Shopping Centers
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View of Proposed New Galleria Whole Foods at Blvd Place at Former Eatzi’s Site

Uptown residents have had a lot of fun speculating about just how enormous and feature-filled the new Galleria Whole Foods flagship store on Post Oak Blvd. will be. The Whole Foods website lists it at a massive 78,000 sq. ft. — though the page it’s on hasn’t been updated since last October.

But now from our mailbox comes this gushing report:

Rumors have been circulating for the last week that Whole Foods has pulled out of Ed Wulfe’s BLVD Place development on Post Oak Blvd. The owners of a prominent jewelry store across Post Oak Blvd. have been telling people that the deal fell through.

Is this just shopping-center trash talk? Or has something changed? Our informant provides more Boulevard Place and Whole Foods FUD:

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Buying and Selling
02/05/08 8:09am

Manhattan Penthouse: Still Falling

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Condos, Galleria, Homes for Sale, Lofts
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Living Room of Manhattan Lofts Unit 808, Houston

Here’s as dramatic a perch as any from which to enjoy a high-price-condo meltdown: the empty cupola atop the 8th-floor penthouse of the Manhattan Lofts building in Uptown. And hey, it looks like quite a fall to the floor below. Maybe stepping down slowly would make some sense?

Almost exactly a month after our original report on this over-the-top, oversized, and overpriced Manhattan penthouse, the price was cut a sixth time, to $1.65 million. How long before it breaks into six figures?

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Condos
01/23/08 11:52am

Nine and a Half Bathrooms: The Turnberry Tower Penthouse Evacuation Plan

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Galleria, Highrises, Home Design, Homes for Sale, Interiors, New Construction: Residential, Proposed Developments
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Plan of Top Floor Gramercy Tower Suite Penthouse of Turnberry Houston Tower Showing 9 and a Half Bathrooms

Do you experience the urge to urinate frequently? Do you suffer from recurring bladder infections? An enlarged prostate? And one more question: Do you have $8.5 million burning a hole in your (probably moist) pocket?

Well then, you’re certainly going to pee in your pants when you see the exciting floor plans for the two “Gramercy Tower Suite” penthouses on the top floors of Houston’s 34-story Turnberry Tower! Yes, this will be the height of luxury: 11,860 sq. ft. of living space on three separate levels of an Uptown highrise; an additional 3,535 sq. ft. of terraces; 4 bedrooms plus a Den, a Guest Suite, and a Staff Room for live-in help; a Media Room, two Lounges, and a 2-story Great Room; a private elevator entry; your own private pool and cabana; and so much more.

But forget all that. What makes this little pied-à-terre special is that even if all that space perched high in the sky (and the at-least-jaw-dropping panoramic views) gives you an unmistakable urge to evacuate, you’ll only be a few shuffling paces away from a toilet: Each unit comes with nine-and-a-half bathrooms. And if that’s not enough, there’s plenty of room to add more!

Read on for more of the scoop on where to poop: floor plans for the top two floors, with more porcelain palaces clearly marked. Plus: a closeup of Swamplot’s favorite Turnberry penthouse pit stop!

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Condos
01/16/08 9:39am

A First Look at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Tower at Boulevard Place

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Galleria, Highrises, Hotels, Mixed Use, Proposed Developments
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Rendering of Ritz-Carlton Hotel Tower Proposed for Blvd Place, Uptown, Houston, by SOMA tipster sends Swamplot this sneak peek at the hotel tower planned for Uptown’s Boulevard Place development. That’s somewhere around 180 highrise condo units perched on top of a 225-room hotel, which the Chronicle reported this weekend would likely be a Ritz-Carlton.

A tower that’s tall, thin, sleek, and half-dressed would seem about right for the Galleria, no? We count about 31 stories in the hotel-tower drawings before our eyes get all buggy, but plans might call for a building even taller than that. Our source reports that the hotel tower might end up taller than the 55-story apartment tower the Houston Business Journal reported that the Hanover Company was also planning for the site.

After the jump: The view from above!

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Apartments
12/21/07 4:15pm

Galleria-Area Apartments Coming to Site of Galleria-Area Apartments

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Demolitions, Development Strategy, Galleria, New Construction, New Construction: Residential, Proposed Developments
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Le Maison on Revere

Uptown renters: Were you planning on staying in your apartment for a while?

A sharp-eyed reader notes that ZOM — the developer of the Bel Air on Allen Parkway and the new Katrina Memorial apartments planned for Revere St. near Kirby and Westheimer (pictured above) — is also planning a 250-unit apartment complex somewhere near the Galleria. The company’s going to stick with its strategy of buying existing apartment complexes, demolishing them, building newer apartments in their place, and then selling them off, ZOM’s Trip Stevens tells Globe St.‘s Amy Wolff Sorter:

“It’s the only way to go in that submarket,” Stevens says. But then he adds real news:

Stephens says ZOM will do the same thing to get its third Houston project into the Galleria submarket. He says the closing for the existing apartment complex should occur late in the first quarter. The plan is to start scraping the three-acre site around midyear.

That’s information a few Galleria-area renters who live in three-acre apartment complexes will probably want to know.

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Buying and Selling
12/19/07 1:57pm

Who’ll Take Manhattan?

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Condos, Galleria, Highrises, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Lofts
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Living Room of Manhattan Lofts Unit 808, Houston

This delightful unit has lingered on the market for a mere 22 months. That’s a long wait for a condo bubble that never happened. And hey, it ‘s a fun ride down the price ladder!

The grossly oversized two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath corner unit on the top floor of the misplaced Manhattan building in the Galleria was originally priced at $2.1 million, back in the swelled-heady days of February 2006. Five methodical price drops later, we’ve reached $1,695,000. That’s a lot of cuts, but we’re still not even down 20 percent: how low will the program-trading-style reductions go?

After the jump, more pics of the . . . uh, eclectic interior.

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Galleria
12/11/07 10:15am

Fig. Leaves: Miraculous Advanced LipoDissolve Works on Retail Locations Too!

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Openings and Closings, Retail, Shopping Centers, Sugar Land, The Woodlands
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Collage of Diagrams from fig. Medical Body Shaping Website Showing How Advanced LipoDissolve Is Supposed To Work

Swamplot’s many readers eager to return to Houston-area Fig. Medical Body Shaping clinics for continuing fat-reducing injections will be saddened to learn that the national chain has abruptly shut down and discontinued all operations. A note on the fig.com website indicates the company will likely be seeking bankruptcy protection.

There are three local Fig. clinics: in Sugar Land at 59 and Highway 6, next to Panera Bread; next to Jamba Juice at the Summit Plaza by Lakewood Church; and at the Portofino Shopping Center across I-45 from the Woodlands. (Yes, that’s the same Portofino Shopping Center that was home to the statue-genitalia controversy a few years back — which was ultimately solved with . . . a fig leaf.) All three Houston-area Fig. locations had been open only since April.

Okay, whose inside joke was it to locate all three fat-reduction clinics in shopping centers on feeder roads?

What happened to Fig. that would cause it to shut down so suddenly? (Reader caution: suggestive uh . . . medical detail below.)

CONTINUE READING THIS STORY

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Commercial Real Estate
12/10/07 10:02am

CompUSA Boxes Available Soon

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Galleria, Openings and Closings, Retail, Royal Oaks, Shopping Centers
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Empty Willowbrook CompUSA store

Looking for a couple strategic locations on Westheimer for Big Box stores . . . say one near the Galleria, the other near Kirkwood? You’re in luck: CompUSA is toast.

Turnaround firm Gordon Brothers Group has acquired computer manufacturer CompUSA for an undisclosed amount. As part of the deal, Boston-based Gordon Brothers is closing all 103 CompUSA stores, which will remain open through the holiday season.

Sound familiar? CompUSA shut down 176 locations nationwide this past February, including stores in Sugar Land, Baybrook, Willowbrook, and another on FM 1960.

Photo of empty Willowbrook CompUSA: Ailona Gellert

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