New Construction

Downtown
12/28/11 11:37am

The North Line Bridge Is Up

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Near Northside, New Construction, Public Transportation
21 Comments

Reader Heidi Hagen’s photos of construction on the North Line along N. Main St. north of UH-Downtown show the new bridge that’s “popped up outta nowhere” around Hogan St. No, there’s no rainbow at the north end of Downtown, but if you look carefully from the right far vantage point can see the elevated concrete and steel construction that’ll be carrying an extension to the existing rail line over the Union Pacific railroad tracks to further points north: Lindale Park, the Northline Transit Center, and 6 other newly named stations. More bridge pix from earlier in the month:

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Construction Materials
12/09/11 11:40am

Highland Village Apple Store Update: Back Door, Hidden Chambers

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Highland Village, New Construction, Retail
1 Comment

Dedicated Houston Apple Store sleuth Tracy Evans has posted a revised sketch of the glass-ceilinged retail space going up at 4012 Westheimer Rd. in the Highland Village Shopping Center, showing a number of details he’s figured out from careful study. The new sketch shows the store’s glass facade extending beyond the front of the bookending limestone-clad slabs on the east and west sides, as it does in the Upper West Side store this location is clearly modeled after. And contrary to an apparently mistaken report from another source, Evans says the Highland Village Apple Store will feature an entrance in its all-glass back wall, facing the back parking lot and Marmi and Francesca’s behind it.

The 3,100-sq.-ft. Houston store across Drexel St. from Crate and Barrel will be Apple’s first glass-ceiling structure to have glass walls and entrances at the front and back. So where will the back-of-house space go? Evans thinks it’ll be masquerading as part of the cupcake shop next door:

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Churches
12/08/11 9:19pm

Comment of the Day: Apple’s Crystal Cathedral

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Comments, Highland Village, New Construction, Quicklink, Retail
2 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: APPLE’S CRYSTAL CATHEDRAL “Also, does anyone else think that the design looks more than a little like a protestant church, with the vaulted roof, minimal design, and the identical tables setup in rows looking like pews?” [JL, commenting on Comment of the Day: Apple Store Symbolism]

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Construction Materials
12/07/11 12:37pm

Highland Village Apple Store Will Have Glass Ceiling, Front, and Back

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Highland Village, New Construction, Retail
30 Comments

How might a Houston building with an all-glass roof stand up to the Gulf Coast’s formidable sun, heat, and gloppy rainfall? We all should be able to find out after Apple’s Highland Village store opens early next year. Thanks in part to the sleuthing of Houston production company owner Tracy Evans, the building going up at 4012 Westheimer next to the Sprinkles cupcake store has been identified as a smaller and somewhat altered version of the patented design for the Apple store the company opened 2 years ago on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Unlike that design, however — which lists the late Steve Jobs as one of its creators — the company’s first outside-of-a-mall store in Houston will feature not just a glass ceiling and facade, but a glass back wall as well.

Evans’s friend Jeffrey made the napkin sketch above showing the likely appearance of the finished building — based on Evans’s description of what he saw at the Highland Village construction site. Here are a couple of views of the UWS store:

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Development Strategies
11/23/11 2:26pm

Memorial Assistance Ministries Spreading New Wings, Courtyard, Parking Lot in Spring Branch

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Institutional Buildings, New Construction, Spring Branch
3 Comments

With $3.3 million already raised, Memorial Assistance Ministries began construction last week on the first phase of a $4 million, 17,000-sq.-ft. expansion: a new and bigger parking lot extending onto what used to be an open field. Early next year, the nonprofit, which helps out families in need and serves as a last backstop before homelessness for many of its clients, will begin adding 3 separate Kirksey-designed wings to the tilt-wall building the same architecture firm designed for it 6 years ago at 1625 Blalock, north of Long Point in Spring Branch. First up: filling in the building’s back yard with more administrative work areas, more warehouse space for the MAM resale store, and an enclosed courtyard. Once that portion is complete, builders from Brookstone Construction will move on to enlarge the resale store, add a new educational wing called the Center for Family Independence, and insert a drop-off area between them, closer to the new parking area on the north side of the building:

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Apartments
11/14/11 12:36pm

What’s That Going Up Over Yonder Del Monte Backyard Fence?

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Del Monte, Galleria, Highrises, Homes for Sale, New Construction
10 Comments

A delightful backyard scene at this home in the Galleria-area Del Monte subdivision. But hmmm . . . what’s that lurking behind the wood fence at the rear of the property? Could it be . . . the first of 19 stories of a new luxury apartment tower working its way to the sky? Or something more modest? Strangely, the listing for the just-on-the-market $576K home, at 5237 Chesapeake Way, includes this photo but no further details of the backyard goings-on. And yet there’s a crane and plenty of highrise construction action on the former parking lot on Brownway behind the home, between Sage and Yorktown, just west of the Walgreens on the corner of Sage and Westheimer. A Swamplot reader was kind enough to send in some photos of the project so far — along with a plea that someone who knows something about it provide some details:

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Comments
11/08/11 10:46pm

Comment of the Day: When the New H-E-B Market Opens Across the Street

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Lancaster Place, Montrose, New Construction, Quicklink, Retail
21 Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHEN THE NEW H-E-B MARKET OPENS ACROSS THE STREET “I shop at the Dunlavy Fiesta fairly regularly. To brace themselves for the new competition, the staff just got spiffy new uniform shirts, and they’ve put out a banner that says that location has housed a neighborhood grocery store for 60 years (indeed, my grandmother shopped there decades ago when it was a Safeway). I keep wanting to ask the employees if anyone is moving over to the HEB, because if I were running HEB the first thing I’d do is hire away the best Fiesta employees. But I’m sure it’s a touchy subject. I love HEB and will probably shop there, too, but I’m going to feel like a traitor.” [Carol, commenting on Meanwhile, on the Former Site of the Wilshire Village Apartments]

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New Construction
11/08/11 10:55am

Your Early Photos of the Trader Joe’s in The Woodlands

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Retail, Shopping Centers, The Woodlands
3 Comments

The Trader Joe’s market in The Woodlands looks like dirt. For now, at least. Yesterday, the company finally admitted that this tree-stripped site in the under-construction Woodlands Crossing Shopping Center at the corner of Kuykendahl Rd. and Woodlands Parkway will be the first Houston-area store to open (even though the other potential TJ’s location on the horizon — in-town, inside the former Alabama Theater — appears to be in the moving-dirt-around stages as well). Swamplot broke the news of The Woodlands store’s location last week — then asked readers to send in pics showing how far construction has progressed. And our Woodlands-area readers came through with these photos from yesterday and over the weekend, showing just how a baby shopping-center TJ’s is born:

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Attractions
11/02/11 1:39pm

Inside Views of Yoshio Taniguchi’s Asia Society Texas Center, Houston’s Next Big Museum District Thing

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Interiors, Museum District, Museums, New Construction
13 Comments

The big new Asia Society Texas building designed by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi along Southmore Blvd. in the Museum District won’t officially open until next April, but a new slideshow featured on the organization’s website provides early peeks into some of the 38,000-sq.-ft. structure’s ultra-spare interiors. Included in Paul Hester’s photos: Views of the 280-Poltrona-Frau-seat Brown Foundation Performing Arts Theater, meeting spaces with carefully framed garden perches, and closeups of several sleek staircases. The AsiaStore Texas gift shop will probably look a little different from this once it gets loaded up with stuff to sell:

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Demolitions
10/28/11 9:12pm

Building To Suit: New Dress for Success HQ in Upper Kirby

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Houston Architects, New Construction, Upper Kirby
1 Comment

Going up in place of those 2 mod office buildings at 3210 and 3310 Eastside St. east of Greenway Plaza that were scraped earlier this week: this 2-story, $6.3 million home for Houston’s branch of Dress for Success, a national charity that provides support services, career help, and a free store of interview-appropriate attire for women in need of a working-world boost. Once it’s complete, the Houston Dress for Success will be the first of the organization’s 80 U.S. affiliates to own its own land and building. Included in the upgrade from the current leased warehouse at 3915 Dacoma St.: a larger store and dressing-room area, more clothing storage and sorting space, more meeting space, a babysitting area, and much better access to public transportation. Crews demolishing the 2 existing buildings took a break for Tuesday’s groundbreaking ceremony, where fundraisers announced that pledges covering 97 percent of the cost of the Ziegler Cooper-designed structure have already received.

Rendering: Ziegler Cooper Architects

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New Construction
10/28/11 11:09am

Laying Down Tracks at Metro’s 72-Hour Harrisburg and Lockwood Rave

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Public Transportation, Streetscapes
10 Comments

From those rockin’ dudes at Metro, moving to their own beat: a timelapse view of last weekend’s marathon Friday night to Monday morning East End Line construction project at the intersection of Harrisburg and Lockwood. (Traffic lanes and utilities had already been installed.) The beat goes on. . . .

Video: Metro

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Lancaster Place
10/19/11 3:52pm

Meanwhile, on the Former Site of the Wilshire Village Apartments

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Montrose, New Construction, Retail
28 Comments

From photographer Candace Garcia: recent construction pix of the Montrose H-E-BMarket, designed by San Antonio’s Lake Flato Architects (with a little local help on the roof design), and going up at the corner of Dunlavy and West Alabama, across from Fiesta. Scheduled completion date: uh, sometime soon?

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Commercial Real Estate
10/17/11 1:56pm

Meanwhile, Across the Freeway from the MetroNational Death Star

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New Construction, Spring Branch
5 Comments

What large-scale construction project is that about to go up on the north side of the Katy Freeway opposite the 35-story spike-headed Memorial Hermann Tower, a reader wants to know. A sign for MetroNational contractor Anslow Bryant recently went up on the Gessner Rd. site, which was until last year the home of the Gessner Place Shopping Center and Korean grocery store Komart. “It appears that a portion of it (the immediate corner) has been fenced off & the construction signs have gone up,” asks the reader, who also sent in these photos. “My guess is whatever goes here will be vertical.”

A bit east of the tower, and on the opposite side of I-10, Anslow Bryant is currently constructing a 14-story tower for future MetroNational tenant Nexen Petroleum.

Photos: Swamplot inbox

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New Construction
10/07/11 12:45pm

New Yale St. Strip Center Gets Jump on Washington Heights Walmart and Friends

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Retail, Sprawl, Strip Centers, West End
45 Comments

The tilt walls are already up! Those of you who’ve been eagerly awaiting the strip-center-themed revival of Yale and Heights Blvd. south of I-10: here are your signs of progress, snapped just yesterday by a Swamplot reader. No, this isn’t the new Walmart — or the Washington Heights District strip centers promised to go with them. It’s Orr Commercial‘s Heights Marketplace, a separate development facing Yale St. at Koehler — and the Walmart site across the street — beating everyone to the punch. Opening dates for Lovett Dental, Wahoo Fish Tacos, the Loan Depot, and more: next March.

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