HIGHLAND VILLAGE LOCKOUT DRAMA: STEP AWAY FROM THE TOOTSIES! What tenant lockout techniques at the Highland Village Shopping Center lack in effectiveness, they make up in chutzpah: Employees and shoppers arriving for the second day of the big sale at Tootsies this morning found the stores’ windows blacked out, the sign blocked, and the concrete path to the front entrance jackhammered and blocked off with cones and temporary fencing. But that’s no obstacle at all for the sale-obsessed: Black-booted employees of the upscale women’s boutique simply ushered shoppers in through a side entrance for deals on dresses, handbags and shoes! Shopping center CEO Haidar Barbouti announced plans last year to demolish the Tootsies building and replace it with 100,000 square feet of multi-level retail space and an underground parking garage. Tootsies’ long-term lease expired on December 31, but the company’s new store at West Ave hasn’t opened yet. Can’t they work something out? A Highland Village spokesperson tells Culturemap that landlord and tenant have not met “in several years.” Bring on the lawyers! [Culturemap]
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Highland Village
The line at the new Sprinkles in Highland Village is out the door, actual drive-by reporter Miya Shay informs us. This is how they intend to draw $25,000 in opening-day sales. Well, that and Rockets forward Shane Battier doing a little lunchtime counter duty. How fast is he serving, really? To the left: Paper Source, scheduled to open next month.
- Official Opening of Sprinkles [Twitter]
- Previously on Swamplot: Highland Village Sprinkles
Photo: Miya Shay
WESTCREEK APARTMENTS: REFINANCED, WAITING The Austin-based owners of Westheimer’s Westcreek at River Oaks Apartments — just inside the Loop, just west of the giant new steel sculpture known as High Street — have refinanced the 574-unit complex with a $27.5 million, 7-year, floating-rate loan that allows prepayment with a penalty: “A flexible prepayment also means when market conditions warrant, the owner can redevelop the asset, which sits on 14.5 acres. ‘This is a well-maintained, but older property that sits on dirt, and the dirt is actually worth more than the apartments,’ [Matt] Greer [of Capmark Finance] explains. He says the asset’s owning partnership, which consists of local management company Kaplan Management Co. Inc. and an equity partner, will redevelop the property when market conditions come back.” [Globe St.]
“Our primary emphasis is a dedication to achieving an overall balance between the interior and outdoor living environment,” reads the copy on the home page of the Mecox Gardens website.
A tour of the new Mecox Gardens store that just opened in the Highland Village Shopping Center reveals part of the magic Mecox formula for achieving that inside-outside balance: Bring in the prints of animals. And bring in the animal prints!
Paloma Contreras, who runs Houston’s La Dolce Vita blog, took these photos on a recent visit. Mecox Gardens features “vintage and reedition” home and garden furnishings.
So here’s a reader challenge:
Late yesterday a reader wrote in expressing concern about the “very cool, worth saving, worth redoing in an intelligent way” 4-plex at 4311 Bettis Dr., just northeast of the stalled-out High Street project on Westheimer. The Bettis Apartments were designed by Robert Wilson in 1955, and are listed as “Most Endangered Moderns” on the Houston Mod website.
A few hours later, 3 properties with the address of 4211 Bettis showed up as demos in the city permit report. You can see them in this morning’s Daily Demolition Report below. The properties are described as the San Felipe Court Apartments . . . didn’t those go down some time ago?
4211 Bettis and 4311 Bettis must be different properties, right? Except HCAD has no entry for a 4211 Bettis. And 4311 Bettis is listed in the rolls as part of the “Trilogy on Bettis Street.”
Swamplot’s tipster provides this tip sheet about the apartments:
Problems getting credit have stalled or dashed hopes for many Houston developments, leaving vacant sites, ratty construction fences, and more than a few misleading “coming soon” signs touting unachievable goals. Off Westheimer just west of Mid Lane, though, we’ll have a much bigger and longer-lasting reminder of changed fortunes to look at, for a good long while: The steel frame of the first building in Trademark Property’s High Street project.
Work has stopped.
What happened?
With the City of Houston code enforcement and permit offices out of commission until Monday — that’s the reason there haven’t been any Daily Demolition Reports here lately — it’s heartening to see that Hurricane Ike hasn’t shut down demolition activity citywide. A camera-phone-wielding bicyclist sends us these photos of continuing non-hurricane destruction from earlier this week at the Highland Village Shopping Center — catty-corner to Cole-Haan, across the street from Crate & Barrel:
Tower? What 27-story tower? A spokesperson for Interfin tells the Memorial Examiner the company has “no plans and no timing as of now” for anything on the site of the State Grille.
What do they mean, no plans? The site plan above, for the northeast corner of Weslayan and W. Alabama, is shown in a document on the Interfin website, labeled “Future Development.” And it clearly shows what the demolition crews were busy . . . uh, building on the site last week.
- ‘No plans and no timing’ for State Grille site [Memorial Examiner]
- Future Development (PDF) [Interfin]
- State Grille Closing Down; 27-Story Tower Going Up? [Swamplot]
- Daily Demolition Report: Living Improvements [Swamplot]
Site Plan: Interfin
HIGHLAND VILLAGE SPRINKLES “Sprinkles Cupcakes, The Original Cupcake Bakery, opens in Houston this winter at 4010 Westheimer in Highland Village. Let’s see, we have Sugar Baby’s, Crave and Ooh La La Dessert Boutique (they’re actually in Katy, TX, but it’s a suburb of Houston so we’ll count it) and now Sprinkles, the one who started the cupcake craziness in 2005 in Beverly Hills.” What’s next — Pinkberry? [Cleverley’s Blog]
Is it going to happen? A construction permit for Pelican Builders’ Highland Tower was approved by the city last week.
A couple purty drawings of a unit, after the jump.
A reader who lives near the Highland Village Shopping Center reports that work on “the structure being built (so slowly) on top of Waterworks” at the corner of Drexel and Westheimer appears to have started up again, after a long period of nothing-going-on. Plus: he hears it’s going to be a French restaurant. Wasn’t last year’s rumor that it was going to be a wine bar?
And speaking of rumors, the same reader wants to know what’s going to happen on the opposite corner of the same intersection, where the Gap used to be:
I have hear that it will be either a 5 story boutique hotel or 2 story retail, and, as of a few weeks ago, that they would be deciding between retail vs hotel by mid May.
The State Grille, the restaurant at the corner of Weslayan and W. Alabama, will be shutting down a little earlier than expected. Cleverley’s Blog and Jennifer Dawson of the Houston Business Journal report that the restaurant will serve its last meal on May 31st.
Restaurant owners Frankie Mandola and Joe Butera sold the property to Giorgio Borlenghi’s Interfin Cos. in October 2006. The HBJ reported at the time that the restaurant had a lease agreement lasting until the end of 2008. Whatever happened to those last 6 months, Mandola doesn’t sound too happy about it now:
Mandola says he asked “a bunch of times,” but Interfin would not extend the State Grille lease scheduled to expire in July.
Interfin won’t say what the company’s plans for the property are, but . . .
According to Mandola, Interfin plans to tear down the building as soon as the restaurant clears out and construct a 27-story building of an undetermined type.
After the jump: There’s more to the property!
The square footages appear to have adjusted a bit since our last report, but Trademark Properties says it has its financing, and that High Street is a go. From a report in Globe St.:
The Fort Worth-based Trademark Property Co. and Coventry [Real Estate Advisors Ltd. of New York City] are redeveloping a seven-acre site of the former Central Ford dealership at 4410 Westheimer Rd. In turn, the JV signed a partnership pact with Indianapolis-based Kosene & Kosene Development Co. for the residential component of High Street. The redevelopment will have 233 apartments atop 100,000 sf of retail and 80,000 sf of office in a separate structure. The foundation’s been poured for the office building, with residential and retail to go vertical in 60 to 90 days.
After the jump, another pretty picture!
Trademark Property has released this new image of its High Street development, slated for the site of the demolished Central Ford dealership at 4410 Westheimer, just west of Highland Village. So . . . is it really gonna happen?
The project had been on hold. It’s now described as “a 6-acre, pedestrian-oriented urban village featuring 93,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space combined with Class A offices and urban residences.” The Fort Worth developer — who also developed Market Street in the Woodlands — had planned to break ground this past spring. Instead, the company has leased part of the site to the sales trailer for the Highland Tower, and politely thrown a picture of that condo building into the background of the new drawing as well.
Don’t confuse High Street with the River Oaks District, a similar but larger project planned for next door.
Continue reading for a site plan and lots more images!
The Houston Business Journal gives more details on the River Oaks District, a 15-acre, $600 million mixed-use development proposed for Westheimer just inside the loop, on the site of the Westcreek Apartments, between Highland Village and the Galleria. It’s hard to imagine River Oaks moving further west than that. Once you get to the other side of the loop of course, you might as well call yourself Tanglewood.
Two luxury hotels are on tap. The five-star properties will have a total of 500 guest rooms, and 150 condominiums for sale at the top of one tower.
Another building will hold 300 upscale apartment units. A 10-story office building with 250,000 square feet of space also is part of the mix. And since the Galleria is synonymous with shopping, the developer plans 350,000 square feet of mostly ground-level retail space.
San Diego developer OliverMcMillan says groundbreaking is scheduled for a good year-and-a-half from now. So there’s plenty of time for this project to morph into a more typical Houston-style mixed-use project: maybe a stylish Sam’s Club next to some shiny new apartments?
After the jump, plans and more flashy drawings!
