March 28, 2008 – 11:34 am
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
Read more about: 77056, Apartments, Commercial Real Estate, Development Strategy, Galleria, Hotels, Mixed Use, Parking, Parking-Garages, Real Estate Marketing, Retail, Shopping Centers, Uptown, Uptown Park
March 24, 2008 – 11:25 pm
A reader directs our attention to this proposed 16-story office building facing the south side of the Katy Freeway, just outside the Loop — on the current site of a Houston’s First Baptist Church parking lot.
Hines plans to build the office building and an 11-level, 1,500-car parking garage on the lot, which the developer would lease from the church. The congregation has already voted to authorize church representatives to finalize and sign a 99-year ground lease for the property.
The garage would help solve the church’s chronic parking problems: According to the HFBC website, 300 cars currently park off-site on weekends. With the Hines development, the church would lose the 480 spaces in the lot now available during the week, but gain 1,500 spaces for church use on weekends and after office hours.
Below the fold, lots more images of the proposed office building and garage on HFBC property.
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Read more about: 77024, Bayou Woods, Churches, Commercial Real Estate, Ground Leases, Houston Architects, Katy Freeway, Memorial, Office Buildings, Parking, Parking-Garages, Proposed Developments
Didja know that the new Costco going up on the former site of the HISD headquarters building at the corner of Richmond and Weslayan . . . is gonna have its very own gas station right out front?
Costco liked the idea of coming inside the Loop so much . . . it decided to bring all its friends! The city just issued a building permit for the new Costco Fuel station. But that’s just the latest addition to Greenway Commons, which is turning out to be quite a mix: A 45,420-sq.-ft. LA Fitness is going above the Costco, next to a 4-story parking garage which is connected to a 2-story retail strip center. It’ll all be protected from the busy surrounding streets by more than 500 surface parking spaces and 2 corner pad sites slated for “banks.” In back: a 550-unit Morgan Group luxury apartment complex . . . with two more separate garages!
After the jump, more drawings and plans of this surprising development.
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Read more about: 77027, Apartments, Big Box Stores, Commercial Real Estate, Greenway-Plaza, Mixed Use, New Construction, Parking, Parking-Garages, Proposed Developments, Retail, Richmond-Avenue, Shopping Centers, Sprawl, Strip Centers
December 13, 2007 – 3:01 pm
Looks like a lot of pedestrian action going on in these marketing drawings for Orr Commercial’s new Heights Village, a five-acre restaurant, retail, office, and “upscale housing” development slated for the current site of the Sons of Hermann hall just south of I-10, between Heights Blvd. and Yale St. and an adjacent parcel abutting railroad tracks to the south.
Why, with all those people in the drawings walking to and fro, it looks like this development will have all the charm of a small old-town Main Street . . . or at the very least all the charm of an old small town that decided to build a multi-level parking garage, but still turned its Main Street into a parking lot anyway, just to hedge its bets.
After the jump: more parking-lot pedestrians!
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Read more about: 77007, Apartments, Commercial Real Estate, Development Strategy, Houston Heights, Mixed Use, New Construction, Office Space, Parking, Parking-Garages, Proposed Developments, Restaurants, Retail, Shopping Centers, Strip Centers, Washington Corridor
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Read more about Apartments, Commercial Real Estate, Development Strategy, Mixed Use, Neighborhoods: Houston Heights, Neighborhoods: Washington Corridor, New Construction, Parking, Proposed Developments, Restaurants, Retail, Shopping Centers, Strip Centers
October 11, 2007 – 11:28 am
A new multistory parking structure is about to go up at the northeast edge of downtown, across the street from Heritage Plaza. A building permit for the parking garage at 1200 Bagby, which is classified as a “high rise” itself, was approved by the city yesterday.
“We’re going to offer suburban parking ratios in downtown Houston,” Russell F. Read, a principal at Goddard Investment Group, told the CoStar group two years ago. “That will be hard to beat.”
Photo: flickr user Corrine Martin
Read more about: 77002, Downtown, New Construction, Office Buildings, Parking, Parking-Garages
August 30, 2007 – 7:42 am
The construction permit for the Medical Clinic of Houston’s new six-story building on Sunset Blvd. in Southampton has been approved by the city. So up it goes! Behind the new building, facing Rice Blvd., will be a new seven-story, 600-space parking garage.
After the jump, a view of the new garage from the adjacent alley.
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Read more about: 77005, Medical Clinics, Neighborhood Disputes, New Construction, Parking-Garages, Rice-University, Southampton
Hines’s new parking garage at the corner of Walker and Main downtown features an innovative lighting design that delivers benefits to neighbors. The problem: drivers parking at night in the unscreened 14-story garage might shine their headlights across the street, directly into residences in the Commerce Towers building across the street. The solution: flood the garage with so much light that cars won’t need to use their headlights at all.
Unfortunately, Commerce Towers residents don’t seem to appreciate all that attention to detail:
it is an extravagant eyesore that expands from Travis to Main (ironically, grossly overshadowing the light rail) and right on Walker. There is no skin on it, and so sits a concrete skeletal nightmare.
Not only is this grotesque structure visually nauseating, it also is a seizure-inducing brightly-lit nightmare! The structure is fleshed out with intensely BRIGHT floodlights on each of its 14 floors, including the roof, that release their ungodly glow (24/7) without obstruction into the living and bedroom units of the Commerce Towers Condominiums!
Hines vice president Clark Davis told the Chronicle two years ago that the garage, which sits on land cleared by demolishing the San Jacinto building, would be “architecturally significant.” Hines developed the garage for the company they sold the property to, Sunbelt Management of Florida.
Photo: HAIF user sevfiv
Read more about: 77002, Downtown, Lighting, Lofts, Parking-Garages
