What happened to that Fortress French development of enormous $2.2-million-plus townhomes (pictured at top) planned for the former site of Urban Retreat across the street from River Oaks on the corner of San Felipe and Revere St.? Builder Rohe & Wright has scrapped plans for the 10-unit Saint Honoré at 1900 Revere St. — in favor of a reconfigured development that will lack its predecessor’s continental pretensions:
If future residents of the new 8-story apartment building that’s being planned to go up in place of the El Tiempo 1308 Cantina and quite a few of its neighboring buildings don’t want to wait around for management to fix their leaky faucets, they won’t have far to go to find spare washers or other plumbing parts. Neighboring fix-it-yourself plumbing supply store U-Plumb-It will likely still be around to sell them parts and hand out advice — because it won’t be included in the redevelopment. But everything north of it, on the block bounded by Marconi St., West Clay St., and Montrose Blvd. will. Developer Sunrise Luxury Living is planning to build 5 stories of apartments — 220 units in all — over 3 levels of parking, a source tells Swamplot. Plans currently include some sort of retail component on the bottom floor, facing Montrose Blvd.
El Tiempo’s Roland Laurenzo reports that the land under his family’s El Tiempo 1308 Cantina on Montrose Blvd. is being sold by the owner for a “multi-story apartment project development.” The restaurant, which leases the space, is looking for another Montrose spot where it can relocate after it closes early next year. Greg Morago’s report in the Chronicle doesn’t provide any additional detail about the proposed apartments, but the 1308 Cantina, bounded by West Clay St., occupies the northern third of a long block capped on the southern end by the for-sale and shuttering Gibbs Boats at West Gray St. Between those 2 properties are a tire shop and the U-Plumb-It supply store. The 1308 Cantina took over from a restaurant called Sabor, a mid-aughts upscale replacement for La Jalisciense at the same 1308 Montrose Blvd. spot.
Update, 4:30 pm:Â Here are some more details on the apartment development replacing the 1308 Cantina and many of its neighbors.
Photo of El Tiempo 1308 Cantina from Marconi St. parking lot:Â Bill Coatney [license]
The Goode Company 4-restaurant fiefdom on Kirby Dr. near Westpark is planning another expansion. Plans submitted to the city show the local chain is seeking to expand Goode’s Armadillo Palace with additional covered patio space, a new courtyard facing Bartlett St., and covered walkways connecting them — all on the current parking lot directly across the street from Goode Company BBQ. In addition, a new Goode’s Armadillo Palace General Store is planned for the far eastern end of the site, with a raised covered porch in front of its entrance facing Bartlett St. The single-story structure housing the store, according to the documents, would be built in a “traditional German country style.”
What should League City expect with the first Houston-area Cabela’s, set to open in a year’s time near the Big League Dreams Sports Park off the Gulf Fwy. and Big League Dreams Pkwy.? All the wonders of wildlife and its stalkers brought indoors, for your perusal and entertainment. That means vast arrangements of deceased but realistic-looking animals mounted in museum-like displays, a “gun library” where you’ll be able to check out the latest in classic, antique, collectible, or just plain hoard-able firearms, an indoor archery range, a fudge shop, and other tourist attractions. Plus, for local flatlanders who may never have seen one, an actual mountain replica. All displayed as it should be, in a big-roofed, fully air-conditioned space not far from Kohl’s and H-E-B.
At 72,000 sq. ft., the store will only be one-third the size of the chain’s behemoth in Fort Worth, but it’ll be bigger than the outposts in Waco and Lubbock. A company press release says the store will feature log construction, as well as other outdoorsy-store mainstays such as metal roofing, wood siding, and stone add-ons.
Photos of Buda (interior) and Allen (exterior) stores: Cabela’s
There is always excitement surrounding an announcement of a new Randall Davis condo tower — before the design is revealed. Everyone wants to know: What mixture of far-away buildings and long-ago eras will the architecture reference? And what affordable materials will it be constructed from? From atop what garage launch platform will it point toward the sky? And even more simply: How grandiose will it be? Late yesterday, only a few hours after posting news that the developer had announced the impending arrival of a condo highrise adjacent to GreenStreet downtown, Swamplot received the humble design submission pictured above from reader Bill Barfield. He claims to have created the rendering “after much research.”
Rendering: Bill Barfield (bill_b)
CURIOUS POLL PUSHERS WANT TO KNOW: SHOULD THE COUNTY SPEND ANY AMOUNT IT WANTS ON AN ASTRODOME REDO? 
The last time a concrete proposal to spend public money to repurpose the Astrodome was on the ballot, Harris County taxpayers voted it down. So how hard could it be to come up with a new poll showing potential voters aren’t especially eager to shell out for the latest floated idea, to turn the public facility into a giant indoor park — about which no details, price tag, or even feel-good drawings have yet been released? Maybe harder than you might think: In stories about a survey sponsored by KHOU and Houston Public Media whose results were released yesterday, a few news outlets did produce dutiful variants of a “Taxpayers Oppose Money for Astrodome” headline. But coming to that conclusion from the actual data collected in the survey might have been a bit of a stretch. Here’s the somewhat ambiguous wording of the question presented, with no context, to likely voters in the coming election: “Harris County proposes turning the Astrodome into an indoor park. Should the taxpayers of Harris County spend any amount to make the Astrodome into an indoor park if no private investors want to fund the entire project?” 31 percent said yes, 51 percent said no, and 17 percent of respondents said they didn’t know. The subset of respondents who thought they were being asked if they’d be willing to give county government a blank check for a plan they’ve never seen wasn’t broken out separately. [Houston Chronicle; KHOU; Houston Public Media; Astrodome coverage on Swamplot] Photo: Russell Hancock
In announcing earlier today the new condominium tower he and Astoria partner Roberto Contreras are planning to build downtown, Randall Davis wasn’t so specific about the location he has in mind for the highrise building. But sources tell Swamplot it’s planned for a portion of the block bounded by Polk, Caroline, Austin, and Dallas pictured above. That would put it on what’s now a surface parking lot adjacent to the Dirt Bar (tag line: “We Play Rock n’ Roll”) and across the street from the House of Blues, at the eastern end of GreenStreet (formerly Houston Pavilions). Noodle fans will remember the Dirt Bar spot at 1209 Caroline St. as the former home of Josephine’s Italian Restaurant. The Reserve 101 bar is on the corner at 1201 Caroline St., next door.
The steel-framed doubled-up home at 115 Arnold St. in Rice Military (pictured above) owned by Houston restaurateur Ouisie Jones and her husband Harry Jones earned its demolition permit yesterday, a few months after the property was sold to a developer — for $2.2 million. (It was asking $2.65 million this past March, when Swamplot featured it.) The 24,915-sq.-ft. property is being joined with the slightly larger plot of land under the adjacent warehouse building at 5202 Chandler St. to make space for an F-shaped 22-townhome development.
Pictured above on a grassy field standing in for its potential newer neighbors is the 17-story, Kirksey-designed highrise condo building Pelican Builders is planning for a 1.5-acre lot it bought from the site of the former Westcreek Apartments. It’ll go up near the taller SkyHouse River Oaks now under construction on another section of Westcreek Ln. just south of San Felipe (viewed at left from the adjacent Target parking lot). Nancy Sarnoff reports that financing for Pelican’s project hasn’t been finalized, but the company says it plans to begin constructing the project next summer, whether or not it pre-sells any units. It’ll take 2 years to build.
Here’s a cutaway view looking into what’s being called the final design of the new Downtown campus for Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Escalating construction costs have spurred HISD to accelerate the 2012 bond program that’s paying for the new HSPVA campus along with rebuilding programs at approximately 40 schools. So construction on the 5-story, 168,000-sq.-ft. building designed by the Houston office of Gensler is expected to begin within a few weeks, and end shortly after the 2017 school year begins.
The Saturn V rocket originally planned to boost a never-happened Apollo 18 spaceflight has been lying on its side near the corner of Saturn Ln. and 2nd St. and aimed at Lake Jackson since 1977. An air-conditioned, metal-framed structure was built around the Smithsonian-owned hulk 10 years ago to protect it from the elements, but it makes it difficult for visitors to appreciate just how hulking the rocket is. And recently the new structure has begun to look a bit dilapidated as well. Unprompted by any government agency or basketball team, San Antonio architect Brantley Hightower has been floating a proposal to wrap a more permanent structure around Houston’s most prominent rocketship — one that would restore the drive-by view of its full length (above) that the existing enclosure ruined, and make it clear just how big the Saturn V was:
Here are a few views of the 11-story spec office building planned for the north side of the Montrose Blvd. bridge over the Southwest Fwy., across the street from Kam’s Fine Chinese Cuisine. And yes, it appears developers Griffin Partners really do intend to call the inside-the-Loop project Bridgeview Crossing. The design by Kirksey Architecture includes a single 1,500-sq.-ft. retail space facing Montrose, but the rest of the building at 4503 Montrose Blvd. is all business: 5 floors of office space sitting on top of a 6-level parking garage.
The design’s surface treatments, however, play down that simple offices-over-cars division, presenting instead a glassy-and-griddy front to Hwy. 59 on the south:
A 38,000-sq.-ft. LA Fitness gym and health club and a larger separate multi-level parking garage are planned for the site of the Westbury Centerette, a vacant early-sixties shopping center on West Bellfort St. just east of Chimney Rock. The development would take up the entire block surrounded by West Bellfort, Chimney Rock, Cedarhurst Dr., and Moonlight Dr. — except for the AutoZone and WingStreet at the southwest corner. Plans submitted to the city show the LA Fitness backing up to Moonlight Dr. and facing a row of parking accessed from West Bellfort; the 263-space garage would sit at the corner of Chimney Rock and Cedarhurst:
HISD intends to demolish the last remaining non-garage portion of the Shamrock Hotel complex early next year as part of its plans for a new DeBakey High School for Health Professions. The Shamrock’s former ballroom (pictured at right), now called the Edwin Hornberger Conference Center, has been operated as an event space by Trevisio Restaurant since 2011, but closed in May of this year. That structure will be scrapped, but the parking garage that shares the conference center’s 2151 W. Holcombe Blvd. address will remain, according to renderings of the new high school project. (The garage is the building bathed in white at right in the rendering above.)
