A view of the mix at the corner strip center at Westheimer and Fountainview, where a driver crashed this morning into the storefront of the Yogurtland at 5901 Westheimer, then plowed through an interior wall into the Any Lab Test Now! location next door.
Photo: KHOU
When it opens this summer, the new Microsoft Store in the Houston Galleria will be the company’s 10th retail location. Won’t that be awfully close to the Apple Store? That’s been part of the game plan since the folks behind Windows, Office, and the Xbox hatched their retail scheme in February 2009. The only Microsoft stores so far are in the booming metropolises of Scottsdale, Arizona; Mission Viejo, San Diego, and Costa Mesa, California; Lone Tree, Colorado; Oak Brook, Illinois; Bloomington, Minnesota (at the Mall of America); and the company’s hometown of Bellevue, Washington.
Photo: Microsoft
Moving into the site of the 7-story Compass Bank building demolished a year and a half ago at 2200 Post Oak Blvd., a block north of the Galleria: the bank’s new corporate parent, BBVA Compass. The subsidiary of Spanish banking giant BBVA will be leasing at least 6 floors of a new 20-story tower being developed on that location by the Redstone Companies and Stream Realty Partners. Not officially announced but still apparently planned for the northern portion of the same 6-and-a-half-acre parcel (the grassy area in the foreground of the rendering above, along Guilford Ct.): a second office building, hotel, and more structured parking. Redstone and Stream Realty had previously been marketing the mixed-use property as The Perennial.
“Dear Swamplot, Have I missed the story or has anyone else noticed that Barnes & Noble across from Galleria has closed and is being gutted?” Signs were posted at the Centre at Post Oak Shopping Center store as far back as September; the bookstore’s lease came up at the end of the year. Last we heard, Weingarten was still looking for a replacement.
Photo: Aaron Carpenter
From the window of his office behind the Galleria, Swamplot reader Warren Pattison snaps this view showing a crane installing a large sign on the site of a new office tower scheduled to go up at 3009 Post Oak Blvd. That’s the former site of Tony’s Ballroom, wedged between the Water Wall and the West Loop. An executive with the U.S. unit of Swedish project development and construction company Skanska announced back in January that the project should begin construction by the end of this year, but the company didn’t close on the deal to buy the land — from a subsidiary of Hines — until September. The company will be financing the building by itself. A fanciful view of the design for the now-19-story tower, by local architecture firm Kirksey, as it might appear if no buildings or billboards were nearby, and everybody abandoned the West Loop:
That’s 3-and-a-half levels of parking artfully hidden behind the extended forehead of the new Galleria Whole Foods Market in this latest rendering being waved by the developers of Blvd Place. Also obfuscated: your view of that little mustache of strip-mall-valet-style parking in front, behind those hedges facing Post Oak. But most Whole Foods shoppers will be parking in a separate 300-car underground garage, and will feed into the store on a moving sidewalk. The parking levels above are meant to serve an additional 140,000 sq. ft. of retail, restaurants, and office space Wulfe and Co. is hoping to fill in this portion of its scaled-down redevelopment project. But so far no leases have been signed, reports the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff.
This Whole Foods has now been marked back up to 48,500 sq. ft. — about 25 percent larger than the chain’s Kirby location, but down from the 78,000 sq. ft. originally announced 4 years ago. The latest construction start date: next summer.
Rendering: Wulfe & Co.
Houston’s only 24-7 Starbucks — the seemingly always-jammed one adjoined with a Jamba Juice at the corner of Post Oak and Westheimer across from the Galleria — is getting its once-in-a-decade makeover this week. The caffeine hub shut down last Friday night at 11 and Brazos Contractors’ construction superintendent expects it to be buzzing again by this Sunday night. What’ll be installed by then? Cast stone benches and entryways . . . and a fountain! Not to mention a shiny new interior. Nighthawks can still get their Ventis and Grandes at Uptown Park this week, as that branch is picking up the slack with 4-am-to-1-am hours through Thursday, and 24-hour stretches Friday and Saturday.
Photo: Aaron Carpenter
A sign inside the Rochester Big and Tall store at the Uptown Collection strip center on Westheimer at Yorktown describes the new-concept superstore soon to take it over: Destination XL will be “an experience . . . where life, style and size has no boundaries!†Conveniently, exercise equipment store Hest Fitness Products has vacated the space next door. That’ll make it easier for the large-size men’s clothing store to . . . expand: Workers will bust through the wall separating the 2 spaces, and Destination XL will take over all 11,000 sq. ft.
Textile has closed its doors, reports Katharine Shilcutt, the Houston Press‘s food-critic-in-waiting. But chef and owner Scott Tycer only plans to hang the concept out to dry over the summer: “We were seeing a little bit of a downturn, and business was not as good as it could be. So my thought was that we need to get on with our ideas of moving,” Tycer explains. He tells Shilcutt he’d like to find a new location that will accommodate a separate gastropub, with a distinct but fabric-friendly name. But the Heights won’t be on his shopping list:
Tycer and his partners are currently looking at three different parts of town for the new restaurant: downtown, River Oaks and — most surprisingly — the Post Oak/Galleria area. Tycer lamented the lack of truly inventive restaurants in that area: “It’s either Robert Del Grande and RDG + Bar Annie, or it’s a bunch of chains,” he sighed.
Not moving from the former Oriental Textile Mill on 22nd St. at Lawrence: Tycer’s Kraftsmen Bakery in the same location.
Photo of 611 W. 22nd St.: Heights Blog
THE GREAT OTC HOOKER STEAK-OUT Out on the town and on the tail of some of them high-priced hookers shipped in from Vegas specially for this week’s Offshore Technology Conference, Caroline Gallay strikes gold diggers on Post Oak: “We had by far the best luck at Mo’s A Place for Steaks, where suddenly (around 10:30 p.m.) the almost all-male crowd was inundated with scantily clad young things taking cards and holding court. I saw some of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, and I think I might start hanging with the hussies more often. The once-overs thrice-overs my friends and I got should have probably offended us, but I for one was flattered — even if they were internally reviewing price points. On Monday evening, the first time we trolled for tramps, I’m pretty sure we were even solicited. An older gentleman hovered and leered at our table until we finally spoke to him. Our tab? Close to $70. His face once he learned we were locals, and later that our parents and he shared friends? Priceless.” [CultureMap]
At a meeting last week at Kenny & Ziggy’s Deli organized by Jim “Mattress Mack” MacIngvale, owners of businesses located along Post Oak Blvd.’s vast double phalanx of front-loading strip centers — and representatives of a few of their landlords — groused about Metro’s design for the new Uptown Line and prepared for possible battle. The Examiner Newspapers’ Michael Reed first brought attention to a few quirks of the latest design for the Post Oak stretch of the light-rail line late last year: It features 7 stations, 5 gated crossings, and in all close to 2 dozen traffic signals along the 1.7-mile path from Richmond Ave. to the 610 West Loop. It also blocks all instances of that staple of sprawl-style shopping-center development: the non-intersection left turn.
Had Metro been communicating its plans to the property owners? Had the property owners been relaying any information they received from the transit agency to their tenants?
COMMENT OF THE DAY: INSIDE THE STANFORD FINANCIAL GROUP OFFICES AT 5050 WESTHEIMER “I have been through this building and it is decorated entirely in a (expensive) mahogany-green marble color scheme, put in place about 10 years ago. There is a large Palladian skylight with an ornate stair connecting the upper levels. Sir Allen’s office was huge with floor to ceiling wood paneling with some impressive wood coffers on the ceiling. Allen wanted all the offices around the world to look the same, so they all used this exact same color scheme. The furniture was of the not-so-inspiring big heavy mahagony type and the art on the walls were bad Audubon print reproductions. What was so wierd about the office was how empty it was. This was 2002 and there was almost noone in the building, despite the extreme amount of money that he spent renovating it. There were rows and rows of empty offices and the parking garage had the same empty feeling. There was a private dining room and a commercial kitchen in the building also, with a full time chef (food was great!). The whole building seemed as if it was supposed to present an image of old money grace and prestige, but somehow, it just wasn’t quite right.” [mt, commenting on Westheimer Office Building and All: Allen Stanford Says Sell!]
The 3-story, 62,000-sq.-ft. office building across from the Galleria that was once the headquarters for the Stanford Financial Group will at last go up for sale. Accused Ponzi schemer Robert Allen Stanford, awaiting his trial in a Conroe jail cell, had opposed the sale of any real estate owned by the corporations he controlled until 2 weeks ago, but subsequently changed his mind. A court ruling last week makes it official.
The office building at 5050 Westheimer sits on 1.6 acres and includes a 285-space parking garage. Also to be sold by Dallas court-appointed receiver Ralph Janvey in “stalking horse auctions”: Stanford’s Sugar Land airplane hangar, as well as other properties in Michigan, Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
What about those condos in the Stanford Lofts Downtown?
An executive with Skanska USA tells the Houston Business Journal‘s Jennifer Dawson that the American subsidiary of the Swedish project development and construction company will build and finance this new freeway-side Galleria spec office building all by itself. Design work for the 14-story tower and 8-story parking garage, though, was farmed out to Kirksey.
Where will it go? The 2.3-acre former site of Tony’s Ballroom at 3009 Post Oak Blvd., across the street from the Water Wall Park. Metro will likely want a piece of that property too: A thin, mostly triangular sliver along the property’s western edge is needed to accommodate the new Uptown Line set to run down Post Oak.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: HOW HOUSTONIANS CAN LIVE LONGER, MORE SATISFYING LIVES “I’ve managed to avoid the Galleria area for 2-3 years now and quite enjoy it! That area is a constant pain, construction or not. I’m sure I’ve added a few extra years to my life merely by removing Uptown as an option for anything.” [tanith27, commenting on Trimming Uptown Trees and Driveways: Where Metro Is Shopping for Land on Post Oak Blvd.]
