There’s a jumbo terrace outside the second-story corner condo unit in this here Il Palazzo building that listed earlier this week. It brings an extensive, open air view of the surrounding Museum District, from the corner of Austin and Calumet. But the main portions of the terrace aren’t exactly the most private part of the property:
A passer-by sends this photo showing the scene this morning at the site of the Chateau Ten scaffolding accident that took place a few days before Christmas. The plank-covered Mercedes is gone, but the neighboring apartment building at 2233 Welch St., still wearing its recent quoined stuccover, doesn’t look much worse for the dust-up — does it?
A condo collection in Maplewood Square hit the market in mid-December as a series of listings by the same owner. Units are available individually or as part of a “mixed package of occupied, income producing condos.” Similar (but not-identical), the updated units occupy portions of 2 buildings within the 1974 development, which is across from commercial properties near Hillcroft and 2 blocks south of South Braeswood.
A reader who happened to be on the scene Saturday morning when scaffolding collapsed on the side of the Chateau Ten condo building going up at the corner of Spann and Welch streets just south of River Oaks sent Swamplot these photos and a report shortly after the incident. The Randall Davis development is under construction behind the empty lot on San Felipe on which Hines is planning to build a 17-story office tower:
“I did not see the collapse, but I heard it . . . It sounded like an explosion — power went out immediately.” The correspondent reports running out to find scaffolding for the 6-story building down, “completely covering a house (and Mercedes) and scaffolding bits were dangling from power lines. I called 911. I don’t think anyone is hurt.”
What could have caused this construction accident?
Once an orphanage, a gated 1913 Italianate property near downtown and north of Montrose found new life in 2003 as a 15-unit condo re-dubbed Villa Serena. Its historic pedigree encompasses city, state, and national recognition. A corner unit on the ground level quietly made its market debut on Monday, with a $299,000 price tag. The 1-bedroom home last sold in 2010 for $210,000 — down from an asking price of $245,000 at that time.
Here’s a concept that HKS came up with for a site just behind the Hotel Granduca, Montebello, and Villa d’Este towers in Uptown Park. The concept shows how it might go if you wanted to build a conference center and a combo hotel-condo tower on 14 green acres between Tilbury and N. Wynden off S. Post Oak, just west of the Loop. This rendering shows the boxy exterior of what appears to be the conference center flanking a linear park shooting off from the banks of Buffalo Bayou.
Across town from the new “Stop the San Felipe Skyscraper” signs popping up in River Oaks and Vermont Commons to oppose the proposed 17-story Hines office building, another crop of anti-development placards is objecting in free verse to the Morrison Heights complex of apartments and condos that’s currently under construction near Houston Ave. and White Oak. Eschewing both the bold imperative of the San Felipe signage and the cartoon menace of the Ashby Highrise hatred, these seem to prefer the rhetorical oomph of puns and wordplay and rhyme. And what, exactly, is the development that has received this poetic ire?
The Mirabeau B. condos apartments in Hyde Park take a lot from the city: The sales center, for example, comprised a pair of recycled shipping containers that were powered by the sun. And now atop the building at 2410 Waugh a photovoltaic canopy is hoarding juice for each of the 14 units; cisterns are stealing rainwater that’s then used on the landscaping and rooftop greenery. Even the development’s moniker has been plagiarized. And so it makes a lot of sense that one of the building’s interior features is inspired by something just as local: a transformer box and a snarl of wires. Houston artist Randy Twaddle, for whom power lines have become something of a muse, installed 65 of these gypsum cement tiles in a 7 ft. by 25 ft. wall at the building’s entrance inside its parking garage. Each 40-pound tile, fabricated by Dallas firm Topocast at a lab at UT Arlington, features a 3D reproduction of one of the particularly twisted scenes that Twaddle can’t seem to help noticing.
Just down the block from that recent fence-related mishap at the all-cleared Ashby Highrise site is the proposed site of the . . . Ashby Midrise? Well, the official moniker of this 5-story condo box at Ashby and Sunset is Chateau Ten. And if that name (or the purple-hued rendering pictured on the sign) seems familiar, it’s because an identical building from the Randall Davis Company is already going up on Spann and Welch on the lot adjacent to where Hines might or might not be building that 17-story office tower off San Felipe.
Painterly and lit in its listing photos like a Thomas Kinkade repro canvas, a 1972 townhome is part of a condo-ized pastel-and-wrought-iron block (at right) bridging the Charnwood-Briarbend neighborhoods near S. Voss Rd. and San Felipe. Last week, the well-stocked and comfort-padded property appeared on the market with an asking price of $429,000.
If this deluxe 26-story residential tower is built, as proposed by Interfin and Pierpoint, it’ll add 44 new condos and 2 penthouses to Uptown’s deluxe stock. And it’ll come at a premium: The Houston Business Journal is reporting that the Kirksey-designed, so-called Belfiore will be built with just 2 4,650-sq.-ft. condos per floor, each going for about $600 per sq. ft. These pricey places are planned to start going up in 2014 on a site inside Uptown’s recently expanded tax zone, just west of the Loop on S. Post Oak Ln., near that horseshoe of Wynden Dr.
Rendering: Interfin
A reader sends this stitched-together panorama of the Heights bike trail spanning White Oak Bayou and wonders what’s going on with all the denuding: “This is kitty corner from where the proposed Emes Place condos will go. Mother nature swamped their work in the bayou with the recent rains. They appear to be taking revenge by bulldozing the nearby clump of forest. This is a larger piece of bird/homeless person sanctuary than the tract Emes Place is to be on, so I wonder what the story is. Harris County Flood Control comes by the site all the time, but I can’t find any mention of it on their website, or anywhere.”
Photo: Swamplot inbox
Pelicans are symbols of self-sacrifice, said to pierce their own breast with their own beak to feed their young their blood. But the birds also have real big gullets — fitting, then, as the name of this 4,000-sq.-ft. restaurant under construction at 7819 Broadway in Galveston.
But the restaurant is just one part of the Pelican Rest Marina project developed by Harry Schulz. Across Offatts Bayou from Moody Gardens, the marina’s already operating as a fuel dock and weigh station. And construction is expected to begin soon on seaside condos:
