A kind tipster sends us a link to this new 17- 26-story (including the parking garage), 452,000-sq.-ft. office tower planned for 3100 Post Oak — near Richmond, just across the Lakes on Post Oak from Randall Davis’s Manhattan fantasy in the Galleria. And right next to the new rail line. The plans show room for a ground-floor restaurant, directly on one of the lakes.
A couple more images after the jump!
A reader has questions about the Cosmopolitan, Randall Davis’s tower-on-a-box on Post Oak:
What’s going on with this building? My wife and I looked at this last month as they were closing out and only had 2 units left, with the agent (surprise) saying they would be sold out shortly. Now there are 4 units on MLS. Are these from the builder or resales? There are only 80 units in the building–I wonder if some speculation is going on as I heard that Randall Davis offers sizable discounts to his employees, who bought several of the units at the Cosmo at a discount and are now trying to flip them. Is this Houston or Miami?
Hey, 4 units for sale out of 80 doesn’t sound too bad. On the other hand, it looks like one of the available units on MLS is, in fact, the Miami.
Cosmo buyers, readers . . . any comments?
Photo: HAR
Redstone is planning to tear down the classic Galleria Modern 7-story Compass Bank building at 2200 Post Oak Blvd., Jennifer Dawson reports in today’s Houston Business Journal. But the company isn’t quite ready to announce its new highrise condo development:
David Shindeldecker, chairman, president and CEO of Redstone, confirmed the deal but would not reveal what will be built.
“We are going to do a project there,” Shindeldecker says. “I don’t want to discuss this for another three or four weeks.”
A notice sent to tenants said leases would be terminated December 1st.
See below for a long last look at the building, courtesy of Google and the Netherlands Consulate!
Sure, the super-Mod architecture, elevated sidewalks, artistically moistened streets, and glistening rotunda in the new Boulevard Place renderings make the place look pretty swank, but what’s with the token strip of parking spots out front? Is this gonna be pay-to-display valet? Some kind of shopping-center twist on a velvet rope line? Or just a stab at maintaining Houston street cred: Sure, Post Oak Blvd. might be going urban upscale, but this is one development that won’t be forgetting its strip-center roots!
Updated views of Blvd Place, including the new Ritz-Carlton and Hanover towers — plus a site plan and a Whole Foods puzzle! It’s all below:
There will be a grand total of 652-and-a-half private bathrooms in Houston’s Turnberry Tower. Apparently this is the kind of attention to detail that’s needed to attract buyers who are flush with assets:
When meeting with buyers, Turnberry’s sales staff emphasizes the high life they’ll enjoy, said [Turnberry Ltd. vice president Jim] Cohen, with the 40-year-old condo tower developer.
They’re told, for example, that when they hang out by the pool, a Turnberry staffer will offer a cool towel for their neck and wipe sunscreen from their sunglasses.
Image of Turnberry Tower plaza-level pools: Turnberry Ltd.
Today’s Chronicle has details on that apartment tower the Hanover Company has been planning for Boulevard Place, Ed Wulfe’s Post Oak redevelopment just north of the Galleria. Doing the math, your average 1,650-sq.-ft. apartment in the glass tower will rent for more than $4,000 a month.
That’s before it goes condo, of course.
At 37 stories, the 236-unit Hanover tower may end up even taller than the slender Ritz-Carlton planned directly to the south.
More info from Nancy Sarnoff:
Solomon Cordwell Buenz of Chicago is designing the building, which will have “boutique hotel style” amenities, including a concierge and bellman, as well as a lounge and catering kitchen.
A 19,000-square-foot rooftop pool terrace will be atop an attached parking garage.
The units will be similar to those in 7 Riverway, another Hanover project in the area. They will include stainless steel appliances, granite slab countertops, crown molding, hardwood floors and travertine tile, but will be larger and have additional features and amenities.
Hanover chose to design the building with larger units because it said there was considerable demand at 7 Riverway for oversized kitchens and living spaces.
After the jump: Where it’s going to land!
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!
So a lot of Houstonians don’t really get the Hotel Granduca. Who does? During a recent visit, the proprietor of Houston restaurant blog Tasty Bits came up with one answer:
I was always curious about the people who pay $1,300 a night for a hotel suite in Houston. Who are they? What do they eat? I got my answer as soon as I arrived and saw Karl Rove waiting to get picked up in the lobby (sulfur, smoke, instant drop in temperature, and all). For a split second I thought about inviting him to join us for lunch. It’s not often you are in the presence of one of the more diabolical political minds of our generation.
Tasty Bits has more juicy commentary on the hotel:
Entering Hotel Granduca is a little like following the rabbit hole – just beyond the iron gates and right past the horse mounted statue of Adalberto Malatesta Granduca of Monfallito (?) is a different world than one might find in otherwise sensible Houston.
After the jump: What’s down that rabbit hole! Plus: tasteful commentary on lunch at the hotel’s Ristorante Cavour.
Interfin Companies president Giorgio Borlenghi, who developed Uptown Park and the Hotel Granduca, explains how it’s done:
. . . developers must not forget the principles we Houstonians like so much such as ease of access to the various components of the building and plentiful and readily available parking. As an example, when we planned Uptown Park, we decided to keep it exclusively retail to allow our patrons to park directly in front of the shops and restaurants without having to deal with multistory parking structures.
Keeping Uptown Park “exclusively retail,” of course, meant that his luxury hotel had to go across the street:
I created Hotel Granduca as a unique, elegant and extremely exclusive boutique hotel for the Uptown/Galleria area. I wanted it to be very different from all the other hotels: It had to feel very Italian, of course, and to have a true residential setting, so that it could be someone’s home away from home. What surprises me is that a number of people in Houston are still not understanding this very European concept and somehow think that Granduca is not a regular hotel, but some type of apartment building.
Photo of Arturo’s Uptown Italiano restaurant in Uptown Park: Flickr user heyjebbo
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?
If you’re looking for clues to help you figure out what the McDonald’s on Post Oak is gonna look like when it gets rebuilt, the flashy new website for the Titan doesn’t help much. There’s a video that shows Randall Davis’s latest theme-heavy condo tower from all sorts of dramatic angles, but it never answers the question most of us have been asking since the project was announced last fall: How, exactly, is the drive-thru gonna fit next door?
Davis told the Houston Business Journal last September that the new McDonald’s would be a “long, skinny building” facing Post Oak, between the Titan and the new Alexan Post Oak apartments directly to the north. In the new video, though, there are no Golden Arches, and camera angles artfully block the most direct views of that portion of the building site.
There’s no mention of the McDonald’s on the Titan website. There is, however, a welcome second confirmation that another fine food establishment will be built down the street at Boulevard Place:
A newly planned Whole Foods Market, only half a block away, places hard to find gourmet items at your fingertips.
Okay, so it’s just advertising copy. But it’s recent!
After the jump, more views of the Titan — none of which show where the real Big Macs are gonna live.
All the condos in Randall Davis’s new Titan condo tower on Post Oak will be named after . . . industry titans! Get it? On the 18th floor, for example, you’ll have units named after J. Paul Getty, Coco Chanel, Pablo Picasso, and . . . Bill Gates! Now that’s a party. Floor 14? More people of brilliance, though a few of them might not actually get along so well with each other: Frank Sinatra, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Rudolph Valentino, Steven Spielberg. Isn’t that clever?
It gets better: The Brin/Page is . . . a two-bedroom! Strangely, the Buffet has a Kitchen and Dining Room that are separated from the rest of the unit’s living space. And the three-bedroom penthouse named after Mies van der Rohe — whose neighbors are of course Rupert Murdoch and Neil Armstrong — has a Great Room with a curved wall in it, and is connected to the Entry Foyer by a long hallway.
One unit on floors 23 and 24 is simply named The Titan. But there’s no reason for Randall Davis to be so bashful — he really ought to go ahead and name it after himself. Is there anyone else in Houston who even comes close to his stature in the themed-condo market?
The Titan is a break from Davis’s earlier projects, though — because it seems to have so many different themes! Put all those architects, movie stars, musicians, Silicon Valley insiders, oilmen, and suicidal novelists together in a tower styled vaguely like a comic-book rocketship, add in Michelangelo’s sculpture of David as the naked brochure-and-website coverboy, and you’ve got the Titan’s winning marketing formula! A bit confused? Sure. But if anyone can mix all this stuff up and make it work, it’s Randall Davis.
After the jump, floorplans that prove what we all know already: Designing a great building is just like planning a great dinner party that includes a few famous dead people!
It may not count as confirmation exactly, but we now at least have repetition — from two separate sources — that the new Whole Foods Market our readers have been worrying about will in fact be coming to the Galleria area.
The first source is the Chronicle‘s Nancy Sarnoff, who — after interviewing Boulevard Place developer Ed Wulfe — states that a new Whole Foods will be the anchor of Wulfe & Co.’s new mixed-use development on Post Oak Blvd. . . . though it won’t open until 2010.
The second source is . . . a little unusual. We’ll tell you about it in our next an upcoming post.
Update, 2/26/08: That second source.
Boulevard Place Whole Foods image: DMJM H&N
That parking lot at the corner of Richmond and Post Oak, where the Steak & Ale and Mason Jar used to be? Very popular:
In 2007, Houston-based Hines Interests LP sold 9.4 acres to Rich Oak Properties LLC, an affiliate of Boymelgreen Developers LLC of New York. Sources put the purchase price at $86 per square foot, or roughly $33 million . . .
Rich Oak ultimately opted out of building on the site and chose to sell the entire 9.4 acres.
On Dec. 21, 2007, the land was acquired by Lasco/Hicks Ventures Ltd. Sources estimate the purchase price was $140 per square foot, or roughly $57 million.
A $24 million profit? Not bad for a few months’ work. And they said the days of the Houston land flip were over!
On the same day, Lasco/Hicks flipped six acres to Elegant Development Group Inc. The buyer is affiliated with Elegant Development and Investment Inc., a Houston-based construction services company that does commercial and residential work . . .
Less than two weeks later, Elegant Development flipped the six acres to Deyaar Development.
Deyaar Development is based in Dubai, and likes tall towers.
Uptown residents have had a lot of fun speculating about just how enormous and feature-filled the new Galleria Whole Foods flagship store on Post Oak Blvd. will be. The Whole Foods website lists it at a massive 78,000 sq. ft. — though the page it’s on hasn’t been updated since last October.
But now from our mailbox comes this gushing report:
Rumors have been circulating for the last week that Whole Foods has pulled out of Ed Wulfe’s BLVD Place development on Post Oak Blvd. The owners of a prominent jewelry store across Post Oak Blvd. have been telling people that the deal fell through.
Is this just shopping-center trash talk? Or has something changed? Our informant provides more Boulevard Place and Whole Foods FUD:
