07/19/18 2:00pm

The owners of the 22,860-sq.-ft. warehouse at the bend where Wash Ave becomes Hempstead Rd. have plans to refashion the building as Houston’s latest food hall, complete with 25-plus restaurant tenants, a few grocery and trinket vendors, and an adjacent beer garden — all fronting 22,000-sq.-ft.-worth of park space. Aside from homonymous salad bar concept Let Us, no specific tenants have been announced for the space yet — formerly home to the Emmett Perry oriental rug store and Sugar Creek Interiors’ design studio. But the developer hints that most food stalls at Railway Heights will be of the fresh-never-frozen variety, staffed by “the farmer who reared the animal, the fisherman who caught the fish, the baker who baked the bread.

Later on, plans call for a 600-car automatic parking garage (about 2-and-a-half-times the size of that other robo-valet proposed next to Tacos A Go Go on White Oak) to be added on to the site at 8200 Washington, along with a complex of “container apartments” in the southeast corner of the things. Along with the food hall, they’ll all go in the area marked red in the map above, across the train tracks from InTown Homes’ forthcoming Cottage Grove Lake community.

The map below shows how the site will layout in greater detail:

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On the Timbergrove Menu
04/13/18 3:00pm

The former Haliburton manufacturing plant at 1907 Sabine St. is now the eighth structure to take on a post-industrial life by joining the group of First Ward art buildings collectively dubbed Sawyer Yards. Developer Jon Deal oversaw the redo of what he’s now calling Sabine Street Studios. Its new look consists of freshly-installed siding as well as added clerestory windows and doors along the parking lot on the corner of Silver and Spring streets. Spring Street Studios — another Sawyer Yards building — is just north across the street.

To the south, the building spans the entirety of Shearn St. between Silver and Sabine:

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Done Deal
01/10/18 11:30am

Following the trail of industrial buildings transformed in the First Ward, a Swamplot reader in motion this morning sends this photo of workers getting a boost to install new siding along the Spring St. frontage of the former Halliburton manufacturing plant at 1907 Sabine St. A company overseen by developer Jon Deal bought the 1.3-acre complex of industrial buildings between Spring and Shearn streets in 2016. Five years earlier, Deal bought the property across Spring St. from the Halliburton plant and transformed it into Spring Street Studios. He also developed the Silos at Sawyer Yards studio as well as 2 other art spaces nearby it — all 3 blocks south of the former plant.

The complex includes a vacant lot on the corner of Spring and Silver streets:

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Oilfield Services Redo
06/30/14 3:45pm

Amazon Fulfillment Center, 8120 Humble-Westfield Rd., Houston

Amazon Fulfillment Center, 8120 Humble-Westfield Rd., HoustonHumble-area news website HKA Texas has a few exterior pics of the new Amazon.com fulfillment center that opened last week at 8120 Humble-Westfield Dr. between Kenswick Dr. and Lee Rd. in Houston — a good mile west of the Humble city limits, according to the story, but good enough to rate a Humble address. The author of the story was restricted to exterior photos of the 250,000-sq.-ft. facility a couple miles northeast of Bush Intercontinental Airport, which is officially labeled a “sortation center” by Amazon. (The company typically reserves interior access to carefully controlled media visits such as the one described in this month’s profile of a Phoenix center in Wired magazine.)

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They’ve Got Your Package Here
03/13/14 12:00pm

Houston Cosentino Center, 1315 W. Sam Houston Parkway North, Houston

What more suitable spot could there be in Houston for a showroom, warehouse, and designer-education center focused around Silestone and the other kitchen-and-bath-slabs lines of a Spanish manufacturer to land than in a brand-new complex of tilt-up buildings aligned along the southbound Beltway 8 feeder of the Sam Houston Tollway across from Spring Branch? Not long after the concrete slabs went up at 1315 W. Sam Houston Pkwy. North (north of Westview Dr.), the slabs of ground quartz, marble, recycled materials, and precious stones went in. The multi-warehouse complex opened late last year; The Houston Cosentino Center at Suite 150 opened last week.

So what if the vast concrete expanse of the feeder-road-side parking lot in the middle of the U-shaped tilt-wall complex looks kinda bleak? The inside is set up to be sleek:

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The Kitchen Slabs of Cosentino
12/20/13 5:30pm

100 Hutcheson St., East End, Houston

Having successfully reached its scaled-back crowdfundraising goals with a $10,000 Indiegogo run back in September, the team behind the Houston Makerspace says it has secured a lease for 21,000 sq. ft. in this warehouse building at 100 Hutcheson St., 4 blocks north of the coming rail line on Harrisburg. Inside, eventually, will be shops for jewelry fabrication, screen printing, rapid prototyping (with a laser cutter and 3D printers), carpentry, metalwork, and sewing and textile work, and plain ol’ work work. There are also plans to put in a commercial kitchen and classrooms, install 3,000 sq. ft. of climate-controlled office, studio, and lounge space. Outside, they hope to set up a garden.

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Shop Talk
09/09/13 3:15pm

Since many of the big-headed attendees here at David Adickes’s former SculpturWorx compound are already dressed in formal wear — well, except for the Beatles — it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for the Vanderbilt, the new event space with the highfalutin name being prepped for an opening later this month. A reader reports that the Vanderbilt has applied for its liquor license, and you can see one of those telltale TABC signs hanging beneath the plywood in the window at the top of the stairs.

Photo: Allyn West

04/08/13 2:00pm

This relatively gritty Warehouse District warehouse appears to be the subject of some real estate speculation, reports Hair Balls’ Richard Connelly: A website for the Houston Studios building — home to a 10,000-sq.-ft. soundstage with a 30-ft. ceiling for video shoots, rehearsals, and other creative expressions — features renderings that show it as a cleaned-up commercial complex:

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01/22/13 5:00pm

Whoever owns this warehouse in the East End — he wants to remain anonymous — has donated it for the time being to Historic Houston to house its collection of materials rescued from historic Houston buildings before demolitions turned everything into splinters and twisted metal.

The warehouse is located between Eastwood and Milby at 4300 Harrisburg, right next to the monolithic Maximus Coffee Group plant. This Sunday the mural-covered doors will be rolled up for a few hours while the nonprofit rolls out an inventory including windows, light fixtures, flooring, and siding. Founder and executive director Lynn Edmundson tells Swamplot that the group has been looking for a permanent home since early December; it had leased a warehouse and yard at 1307 W. Clay until closing in June 2011.

Photo: Historic Houston

06/08/12 3:48pm

This 1963 warehouse on the corner of Delano and Dallas in East Downtown was converted into an ultramod residence in 2003. But its new owners, who purchased it about a month and a half ago, are turning it back to commercial use as a co-working space and high-tech accelerator intended for small startup companies developing applications for mobile phones. The 5,000-sq.-ft. building now features a single 800-sq.-ft. dedicated office space and a 3,000-sq.-ft. co-working area which entrepreneurs can use for a $199-a-month per person fee (all-hours access, wi-fi, printer, and coffee included) — or reserve a specific desk in for $299. Here’s how it looks:

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02/16/12 10:18am

Is all that living space on the second floor of this metal warehouse building right off the Tomball Pkwy. frontage road near the end of Jones Rd.  really window-free? Built a decade ago, the 5,062-sq.ft. structure is an unrestricted property suitable for mixed use — and that includes homesteading.

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01/06/12 11:57am

Another reason for checking Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Reports on a regular basis: You might find your home listed on it. Two years ago today, the city’s neighborhood protection department took out demo permits on the houses at 1315 and 1317 Shepherd Dr. at the southeastern tip of Cottage Grove, listing them as dangerous buildings; they showed up on Swamplot the next day. But in a lawsuit filed this week, Bellaire Bead Shop owner Katie Koenig claims she was never informed about the impending demolition of her 2 houses, where she stored her bead inventory. Koenig says she only discovered the houses had been torn down when she tried to visit them sometime around January 8th, 2010; she also claims she was injured on the property after tripping over fencepost stumps left after city crews came back later and partially removed a 6-ft. privacy fence she had had built surrounding the houses.

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09/27/11 2:28pm

This metal-sheathed warehouse at 2032 Karbach St. in the industrial area off Dacoma St. near Dyer Stadium used to be home to craft and imported beer distributor C.R. Goodman. Now a bunch of former Goodman employees have transformed it into the Karbach Brewing Company brewery — which held its inaugural tour over the weekend. Among the commitments of Karbach and its brewer, former Flying Dog CEO Eric Warner: Keeping their 5 craft brews in metal. Karbach beers are available only at area bars and restaurants so far (delivered in kegs by the company’s single delivery truck); starting in January 3 of them should be available for purchase in aluminum cans, too.

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01/21/09 10:42am

THE SAD CONSEQUENCES OF SKIPPING DESSERT Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream will be shutting down its plant at 4494 Campbell Rd., off Clay Rd. in Northwest Houston, by early April: “Dori Bailey, director of consumer communications for Dreyer’s, says the company chose to close the Houston facility, which produces 20 million gallons of ice cream a year, because production demand from the Houston area has been declining over the past several years. ‘Houston was also one of our smallest plants and it only had the capability to make packaged ice cream, while our other plants are able to make other brands of ice cream snacks as well,’ Bailey says. Bailey says the company hasn’t decided whether to sell or lease the 130,000-square-foot facility. About 50,000 square feet of the plant is factory space, while 80,000 square feet is warehouse space.” [Houston Business Journal]