What can you do with those long, old-growth pine floorboards you’ve managed to rescue from . . . say, an old farmhouse being torn down in Pecan Park? And what if you’ve got an extra shower door laying around?
Answer after the jump:
Sign up for the Newsletter
Green Design and Development
From Ziegler Cooper Architects’ website: Renderings of a 20-story office tower the firm designed back in the early 1990s.
As we reported in February, the Novati Group plans to build the 500,000-square-foot spec tower, along with an 8-level parking garage, at 1600 West Loop South — next to Post Oak Motor Cars, on land purchased from Landry’s. The only changes from the original design will be adjustments so the building can qualify for LEED Silver certification.
So what if the design is old? Worrying that your brand new building already looks dated is so . . . last decade!
After the jump: the marble in the lobby will be old, too!
Touring a local home for an upcoming TV news story on green building in Houston, abc13 reporter Miya Shay comes across some recycled leftovers from the last election:
The home isn’t finished yet. So, while the family waits for the stairs to be stained, carpeted, or whatever, they have cut up old campaign signs to use as temporary flooring on the stairs! As the homeowner told me, “They are very durable, and comfortable to walk on.”
- How to recycle politicians.. [Houston Political Blog]
Photo: Miya Shay
Just add punchline: If all goes as planned, Home Depot will soon be operating a LEED-certified distribution center just south of the Sam Houston Race Park in Northwest Houston.
Pennsylvania REIT Liberty Property Trust began constructing the enormous 535,000-square-foot Fallbrook Distribution Center at the southwest corner of Fallbrook Dr. and Fairbanks-North Houston on spec, and plans to submit it to the U.S. Green Building Council for core & shell certification. Home Depot will be leasing the entire facility.
But Home Depot wanted a few changes made . . .
Liberty Property . . . switched gears in the middle of construction to make the facility — originally planned as 615,000 square feet — smaller to suit the long-term tenant. “We disassembled the east side of the building and relocated tiltwall concrete panels to create a larger employee parking area,” [Liberty Property’s Joe] Trinkle says. “We had to take apart the building to accommodate their need.”
The west side of the building was also disassembled and reconstructed in order to add a third loading dock, he says.
Gary Mabray, an industrial broker with Colliers International, says it is unusual for a construction project to undergo as many changes as this one did.
“That building was basically finished,” Mabray says. “They had to go back in and demolish slab and everything.”
Liberty Trust, a real estate investment trust, offered the tenant a build-to-suit option at another site so the building would not have to be converted, but Trinkle says the timing was off.
- Home Depot hammers out deal for new distribution center [Houston Business Journal]
- Liberty Property goes for the green with industrial buildings [Houston Business Journal]
- 8103 Fallbrook Dr [Liberty Property Trust]
Photo of Fallbrook Distribution Center under construction: Liberty Property Trust
This landscape plan from the Boymelgreen website is our first glimpse of the two condo towers the company is planning for 5.5 acres on the southwest corner of the intersection of San Felipe and a short segment of Woodway — just west of Voss, on the Right Bank of Buffalo Bayou. And this morning the Houston Business Journal has more to report:
New York City-based Boymelgreen Developers is developing the project for landowner Azorim, a publicly traded company in Israel of which Boymelgreen owns 64 percent. . . . The unnamed project will consist of two buildings with 28 residential floors each and an 18,000-square-foot fitness center and spa. The project will have a total of 237 condos starting at $1 million each. Units will be an average size of 2,500 square feet.
The architect is Ziegler Cooper. Boymelgreen’s website refers to the project as the San Felipe Condominiums. (And it reports a building that’s 14 condos smaller.)
Jennifer Dawson’s report in the HBJ says that sales won’t start until the fall, after a sales center — which will later “be converted into a spa, restaurant or office building” — is built on the site of the former Dolce & Freddo next door.
Below the fold: That 1960s office-and-shopping center on the site won’t go quietly!
A restaurant scheduled to open today just beyond Beltway 8’s southeastern elbow is the first “Certified Green Restaurant” in Houston approved by the Green Restaurant Association. Cullen’s Upscale American Grille completed 17 of the GRA’s environmental guidelines.
The grille’s proprietor is first-time restaurant owner Kevin Munz, who previously built a chain of 13 Houston-area pawn shops. He sold the Mr. Money Pawn shops to Cash America International in 2006. Two years before that, he bought 92.8 acres of undeveloped land at the eastern edge of Ellington Field and began planning Clearpoint Crossing, a series of strips along the west side of newly extended Space Center Blvd., featuring retail/lease space, a professional-office park, and a multifamily residential project.
Cullen’s is intended to be Clearpoint Crossing’s main attraction: a 37,000-sq.-ft. Las Vegas-style eatery with seven private dining rooms — including one built of glass and suspended over the main dining area — a ballroom, space for outdoor dining, and seating for 700 diners. Customers will have their choice of china: Wedgwood, Versace, or “the Titanic.” Munz spoke to the Houston Chronicle‘s David Kaplan about his plans for Cullen’s last year:
“I’ve been all over the U.S. and looked at restaurants. It’s the best of a bunch of different concepts and putting them into one, Munz said. “It’s the same thing I did with pawnshops.”
Munz told the South Belt-Ellington Leader he hopes to attract customers driving from as far northeast as Baytown and as far south as Galveston to his green restaurant, saying he “wouldn’t have done this in town.”
Munz expects the Clearpoint Crossing’s land value to “go up the day I open the restaurant,” he told Kaplan. That would be today!
After the jump, a plan of the whole Clearpoint Crossing development. Plus, a few of the restaurant’s green features!
It’s a little old bungalow on a small lot . . . but it’s clean and green inside! The sellers of this 2-bedroom, 1 1/2-bath, 960-sq.-ft. home say they’re trying to get this Sixth Ward home LEED certified:
The 1920 facade has been preserved, but when you open the door, its all about 21st century. The hm has been renovated using non toxic materials, low VOC paint & sustainable design materials.
A neighbor who watched the work reports the house was sold to the current owners as a teardown:
It was a nasty, dirty, filthy, funky house with a garage in the front yard. They tore the garage off the front, moved the house around on the lot a tad, and have done an outstanding renovation.
Plus: the neighbors are very very quiet, says our correspondent. The house is next to Glenwood Cemetery.
Read on for more pics, from before and after!
From our email comes a message from a reader who has heard from someone involved in the project that the white poles shown at the top of the new Discovery Tower drawing are . . . indeed, wind turbines.
So . . . if they do end up being put in, how much energy will they bring to the building? And . . . how many tenants?
- Discovery Tower [LoopNet]
- Discovery Tower: Ready for Closeup? [Swamplot]
Thanks to an alert poster on HAIF, we now have a more up-to-date and better view of Discovery Tower, Trammel Crow’s 30-story office building — designed by Gensler and planned for a perch on the north side of Discovery Green Downtown.
Other HAIF participants have been speculating whether the shorter white poles at the top of the image are supposed to be . . . wind turbines!
Well, are they? Scrutinize a larger version of the rendering and judge for yourself . . . below the fold.
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?
- Building fills West Loop bill [Houston Business Journal]
- New 20 Story Tower on West Loop [HAIF]
A reader who works in the Energy Corridor reports that a sign has just appeared at the Northwest corner of Enclave Parkway and Eldridge Parkway announcing Eldridge Oaks, a 350,000-sq.-ft. 14-story office tower being developed by Transwestern.
Transwestern is apparently taking energy issues in this Energy Corridor building seriously: It will pursue an unspecified LEED rating, and has signed the project up as a sponsor of this spring’s Gulf Coast Green conference. Plus, this drawing from the project website shows what the building will look like when the lights go on . . . then off . . . then on!
- Eldridge Oaks [Transwestern]
- Transwestern plans twin towers in Energy Corridor [Houston Business Journal]
- Gulf Coast Green 2008 Symposium and Expo [AIA Houston]
Yes, that’s a hedge of dense kudzu wrapping around this long skinny house . . . and threatening to do the same to its Fifth Ward neighbors. The kudzu, a court of crushed oyster shells, a house-length porch, a cistern, Murphy beds, and a butterfly roof are the major features of House 99, one of five finalists in a local competition to design a “green” house for $99,000 or less.
House 99 was designed by L.A. architect and USC professor Gail Borden. The Rice Design Alliance and Houston’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects want to build the winning design of their $99K house competition at 4015 Jewel St., or on other properties swept up by the city’s Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority.
Below the fold: More drawings! More kudzu! More cost-saving measures! More greenness!
That house built out of shipping containers on Cordell St. in Brookesmith looks like it’ll be ready for delivery soon. Yes, this was a spec house — and yes, there already is a buyer.
Last year, Numen Development owners Katie Nichols and John Walker used shipping containers to construct the Apama Mackey Gallery on 11th St. in the Heights — because the gallery owner wanted a structure she can move when the property owner kicks her off the land. But the house Numen is building on Cordell looks like it’s going to be around for a while. It comes with its own, uh . . . doublewide lot, and it’s right across the street from a meat-processing plant.
After the jump: drawings, models, and an earlier construction photo of this neat little three-bedroom, three-bath, 1,851-square-foot package!
Will something like this be coming soon to a home near you? Up now: a green roof atop a renovated building that will serve as a fabrication shop for architecture and industrial design students at the University of Houston. Unlike most of Houston’s (few) commercial and institutional buildings with a planted roof, this one has a slope to it.
- New ‘green’ roof project could change the way homes are built [abc13]
- New Design Center at UH Recycles the Past To Prepare Students for the Future [University of Houston]
- UH Greenroof Updates! [Green Team Houston]
Photo of Burdette Keeland Jr. Design and Exploration Center: Green Team Houston
One advantage of keeping your Houston-style Big Tower in a Wealthy Residential Neighborhood project secret: You can plat the property, prepare traffic-impact studies, and upgrade utilities before anyone notices. One downside: Media-savvy neighbors might catch on and announce your project before you do. Or at least release renderings.
Here’s what Buckhead Investment Partners is saying about the 23-story mixed-use tower the company is planning for the current site of the Maryland Manor apartments, on the south side of Bissonnet near Dunlavy: A six-story base will include a 467-car parking garage, space for retail and a restaurant on the ground floor, and five live-work townhomes. An “amenity plaza” level on the sixth floor will have an exercise room, spa, and office space. Above it all: 17 floors of either apartments or condos.
Rainwater collection. LEED-Silver rating. Red-brick exterior with cast-stone details. But best of all is the spin:
The project design has been chosen so that all building residential units will be above the tree line, ensuring the greatest level of privacy for the surrounding neighborhood and the maximum view of Houston’s skylines and tree canopy from the units.
Emerging Boulevard Oaks development strategy: You won’t be able to see us, because we’ll be above the trees.
- We want development…but not that much! [Houston Political Blog]
- High rise plan not picture perfect with Museum District residents [abc13]
- Redevelopment of 1717 Bissonnet [Buckhead Investment Partners, Inc.]
