February 8, 2010 – 2:21 pm
The Houston Business Journal’s Jennifer Dawson is reporting that a hotel developer out of Fort Worth is purchasing the 22-story office building at 806 Main St. Downtown with plans to gut it, renovate it, and reopen it as a hotel. The building is approximately 100 years old, but its top 10 floors were added in the 1920s. The stone, terra cotta, and brick structure was dressed in a marble-and-glass slipcover about 60 years later. Directly across Rusk St. from the tower is the construction site of Hines’s MainPlace development.
The city has designated 806 Main as a landmark. It’s connected to the Downtown tunnel system, but has remained mostly empty in recent years. The last of 40 recent tenants is scheduled to move out this week. Building manager Betty Brown tells Dawson that only the Christian Science Reading Room and Domino’s Pizza on the ground floor will be left — their leases run out in 9 to 12 months.
With the exception of the Embassy Suites in downtown Fort Worth featured prominently on its website, Pearl Real Estate has built or redeveloped mostly suburban-style hotels. The 10-year-old company typically operates its own properties and serves as its own general contractor.
What kind of hotel is Pearl planning underneath this slipcover?
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77002, Downtown, Hotels, Houston Landmarks, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments, Redevelopment
January 29, 2010 – 9:40 am
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?
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77056, Allen Stanford, Auctions, Buildings for Sale, Galleria, Office Buildings, Stanford-Lofts, Uptown
January 22, 2010 – 9:38 am
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.
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77056, Commercial Real Estate, Financing, Galleria, Highrises, Land Sales, Office Buildings, Proposed Developments, Uptown
January 19, 2010 – 2:32 pm
At the end of a long article chewing over the possibility that Shell Oil might move out of its longtime Downtown office-tower home, real estate writer and promoter and longtime mustache-wearer Ralph Bivins finally reveals why he likes One Shell Plaza so much: Long ago, the 50-story concrete building with the travertine facing saved him and his brother-in-law from a possible night in the slammer.
A few decades ago, the Houston Police Department employed some officers who had a sore spot against guys with long hair and other suspected hippies. Anytime, you could get pulled over because having long hair and a mustache was “probable cause” for HPD to make a traffic stop. I was in the passenger seat late one night when my slightly shaggy brother-in-law got pulled over in the Montrose area. Even though we were doing nothing wrong, the policeman gave him general hassle, scrutiny and in-depth questioning.
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77002, Downtown, Highrises, Houston History, Office Buildings, One Shell Plaza
November 30, 2009 – 9:55 am
Hospital executive Adam Lane tells the Houston Business Journal’s Jennifer Dawson that the easiest patients to move into the new Memorial Hermann Tower on I-10 will be . . . the babies, “because they don’t know where they’re going.”
Also, it sounds like some of the interiors might prove a little disorienting for suburban kids:
A hospital floor dedicated to children has been elaborately designed as a town center. The hallway is made to look like a street with curbs, grass and storefronts.
Fortunately, more familiar surroundings will be nearby: the building is connected by skybridge to the Memorial City Mall.
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77024, Commercial Real Estate, Highrises, Hospitals, Medical Buildings, Memorial City, MetroNational, New Construction, Office Buildings, Office Space
November 25, 2009 – 9:25 am
H. Dan Miller, senior managing director of the Houston office of Holliday Fenoglio Fowler, commenting on the sale he recently brokered of the fully leased 30,000-sq.-ft. office building and bank drive-thru on an L-shaped property at 10411 Westheimer in Westchase, which received 18 offers within a week:
You had an irreplaceable location at the corner of Westheimer and Beltway 8 and three streets of frontage. I wish I had 10 of these types of buildings.
Photo: Holliday Fenoglio Fowler
Read more about: 77042, Buying and Selling, Commercial Real Estate, Freeways and Toll Roads, Office Buildings, Sprawl, Westchase
November 20, 2009 – 2:52 pm
What do all these Houston office towers have in common?
- The Fulbright Tower,
- 1 Houston Center,
- 2 Houston Center,
- 4 Houston Center,
- Post Oak Central One,
- Post Oak Central Three,
- Post Oak Central Two,
- One Greenway Plaza,
- Two Greenway Plaza
- Three Greenway Plaza,
- Four Greenway Plaza,
- Five Greenway Plaza,
- Eight Greenway Plaza,
- Nine Greenway Plaza,
- Eleven Greenway Plaza, and
- Twelve Greenway Plaza
That’s right — they’re all part of the vast Crescent Real Estate Equities empire, which at the peak of the market 2 years ago comprised 54 properties in all, stretching from Texas to the California coast. That’s when Morgan Stanley snatched up the whole thing for a mere $6.5 billion, thanks in part to a little $2 billion loan from Barclays Capital.
Today, Morgan Stanley announced it is giving up on the whole thing. Back to the bank all those properties go. All of them. (Okay, minus a few that were jettisoned along the way.)
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77002, 77046, 77056, Commercial Real Estate, Defaults, Downtown, Financing, Galleria, Greenway Plaza, Office Buildings, Real Estate Investing
November 16, 2009 – 1:03 pm
A reader sends in photos of the new Hess Tower, formerly known as Discovery Tower, under construction adjacent to Discovery Green Downtown.
You can see the tower isn’t quite finished yet but it sure looks like that plaza in front of it already is! Though really, all those office workers look a little young, don’t you think?
More pics:
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77010, Commercial Real Estate, Discovery Green, Discovery Tower, Downtown, Green Design, Highrises, New Construction, Office Buildings
October 26, 2009 – 4:01 pm
Not a fan of the “ugly uninspired office parks” that line Beltway 8 on the west side of town, radio geek and computer answer guy Jay Lee finds he has a few nice things to say — and photograph — about the recently completed first phase of Westchase Park, a Simmons Vedder office development that’s replaced the Cinemark Tinseltown Westchase just north of Westpark:
There’s a water feature in the front of the building that sports a metallic sculpture which sort of reminds me of the contraption from the movie “Contact.” It’s by far the most interesting piece of architecture I have seen out here on the west beltway.
The building itself is glass and chrome and glints in the daylight. I was kind of hoping the sculpture was a corporate logo of some kind and that this was going to be to world headquarters of some up and coming conglomerate or something. Alas, it is simply a business park and will soon be selling office space to those looking to setup shop in the Westchase District.
On the plus side, it looks pretty cool at night:
Continue Reading This Story >
Read more about: 77042, Houston Architects, New Construction, Office Buildings, Redevelopment, Westchase
October 12, 2009 – 10:40 pm
From his perch high in the (formerly AIG) America Tower on Allen Parkway, Swamplot reader Stephen Cullar-Ledford forwards this latest dramatic scene, which aches for suitably metaphorical captioning.
A few months ago it was fog, this afternoon it’s a rainbow over downtown . . .
Photo: Stephen Cullar-Ledford
Read more about: 77002, 77019, AIG, Downtown, Economic Conditions, Flooding, Highrises, Montrose, Office Buildings, Weather
September 18, 2009 – 11:56 am
“Among projects slated to begin construction soon are the 477,000-square-foot Energy Tower III from Mac Haik Realty Ltd. on the Katy Freeway, the 170,000-square-foot Enclave Corporate Center and the 230,000-square-foot Energy Crossing II, developed by Phoenix-based Opus West Corp. on the Katy Freeway. Currently, 13 new office buildings are being constructed in the Energy Corridor, according to the Energy Corridor Management District. Major developments coming online in the near future include the 300,000-square-foot Three Eldridge Place at 737 North Eldridge Parkway being developed by Dallas-based Behringer Harvard; the 447,000-square-foot Energy Tower II, which is expected to be completed this fall and will be occupied primarily by Technip; and Eldridge Oaks I, a 350,000-square-foot building at 1080 Eldridge Parkway being developed by Transwestern. In all, the market will gain an estimated 1.25 million square feet of new space, of which about 33 percent is pre-leased. Class A vacancy is expected to increase by about 50 percent this year, its highest rate in five years, according to market experts.” [Houston Business Journal]
Read more about: 77079, Commercial Real Estate, Energy-Corridor, Leasing, New Construction, Office Buildings, Office Space, Proposed Developments, Quicklink
September 14, 2009 – 10:33 am
What’s happening to this brick office building on West Dallas, just east of Dunlavy? The Houston Business Journal’s Jennifer Dawson reports it’s getting an energy-conscious renovation — overseen by Bailey Architects, designer of the original building in the early eighties.
The West Dallas building used to house local advertising firm Sachnowitz & Co. The vacant site of the former Aquarium Lounge is next door.
Early next year, the Royal Norwegian Consulate General will be moving in. The consulate general currently occupies offices in a tower on Allen Parkway.
Photo: Swamplot inbox
Read more about: 77019, Green Design and Development, North Montrose, Office Buildings, Renovations
Diehard Modernist architect Charles Gwathmey, dubbed one of the “New York Five” (along with Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, and John Hejduk) in the early 1970s, passed away yesterday in Manhattan of esophageal cancer. Gwathmey, who was 71, was probably most famous for his addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, which his firm, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, completed in 1992.
Gwathmey-Siegel was no stranger to Houston. In the late seventies and early eighties, the firm designed a series of 4 spec office buildings that line the south side of this city’s North Belt, just southeast of the Greenspoint Mall.
Photos: LoopNet (400 N. Sam Houston Pkwy. E) and Feagins Interests (Damson Oil Bldg., 260 N. Sam Houston Pkwy. E)
Read more about: 77060, Architects, Greenspoint, Houston History, Office Buildings
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!]