Swamplot Archives by Tag: Retail

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Coming Soon to San Felipe: Winetopia

Never mind that wine bars the Wine Bucket, the Corkscrew, and the Tasting Room in Midtown have all been poured down the drain since January. Krutar Patel says he’s planning to open his brand new wine bar, Winetopia, this May. He’s already added his placard to the giant brick sign in front of the Fairmont on San Felipe at 6363 San Felipe.

The midrise apartment complex with a retail center on its ground level is already home to a martial-arts studio and a Subway. Winetopia will sandwich itself between the two businesses. Patrons will be able to stumble upstairs to their apartments or, if necessary, to the 24-hour St. Luke’s Community Emergency Center in the same center, conveniently located just yards away.

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Monday, March 15, 2010

The Lingering Sounds of Selling by the Freeway

   

Almost a week after the daylong feeder road-side furniture sale they held on the abandoned grounds of the former Landmark Chevrolet next to I-45 North near the West Gulfbank exit, wacdesignstudio designers and guerrilla marketers Scott Cartwright and Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright were still feeling the effects: “We were there for nine hours, thankfully it was cloudy… but the sound pollution really affected one of us to the point that even today our head and bodies still hurt… can you imagine how hard of a job road workers have when building or fixing the streets?” [Swamplot inbox; previously on Swamplot]

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Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Comment of the Day: Imagining the H-E-B Heights Revitalization Plan

   

“The Sons of Hermann site would not have to be dry. There used to be a liquor store at the Boulevard and the bayou - Kims #1. Tapping in to all the people who now live within drunks-puking-in-your-driveway distance of Washington makes that site a good choice. Enter from Yale or Heights. Then maybe those condos that are 6 feet from the RR [tracks] would finally sell.” [finness, commenting on H-E-B Plans To Build a Montrose Grocery Store at Wilshire Village]

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Friday, March 5, 2010

H-E-B Plans To Build a Montrose Grocery Store at Wilshire Village

No, H-E-B isn’t just buying the former site of the Wilshire Village Apartments at the corner of Alabama and Dunlavy as a real estate investment. H-E-B Houston president Scott McClelland tells the Houston Business Journal’s Allison Wollam that the company expects to open its Montrose store on that site next year:

We . . . have a site tied up at Alabama and Dunlavy in the Montrose area that we’re finalizing. I think that it’s far enough from our recently opened Bissonnet and Buffalo Speedway store and it will be a good new market for us.

Okay, while we’re at it . . . what are H-E-B’s plans for the Heights?

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Monday, March 1, 2010

Comment of the Day: The Soccer Stadium at Finger Furniture

   

“Am I crazy to ask the question why this site would not be an easier solution for the Dynamo’s stadium? It’s right on 45 South, has much better ingress/egress than the east end site, with dedicated exits going north and south, very close to downtown. . . . Looking closer, too, it makes for easy alternative use(s) for the stadium (which means TSU can have even more convenient use of the facilities with their campus not 2 miles away), near Hobby Airport for sports fan travelers/reporters/etc., and doesn’t take a ton of money to make the site possible since it already has a vast parking lot, utilities, (albeit obnoxious) pylon freeway sign. Knowing the Fingers family, they would take the call, and be happy to trade the site for another from the city for future development. Yahtzee!” [JG, commenting on A Whole New Ball Game: Fingers Back and Open for Business]

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What’s Happening to That Spanish Bookstore on West Alabama?

Roving Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia spots a for sale sign up at the Libreria Española on the north side of West Alabama between Stanford and Audubon:

I know the owner/manager was elderly, but watching him in the mornings get his shop ready and opening the gates was really a nice thing to see. I’m hoping he is not ill or deceased. It’s always sad to see small businesses close.

Who said it’s closed?

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Post Oak Strip Centers Versus the Uptown Light Rail Plan: The Gathering Storm

At a meeting last week at Kenny & Ziggy’s Deli organized by Jim “Mattress Mack” MacIngvale, owners of businesses located along Post Oak Blvd.’s vast double phalanx of front-loading strip centers — and representatives of a few of their landlords — groused about Metro’s design for the new Uptown Line and prepared for possible battle. The Examiner Newspapers’ Michael Reed first brought attention to a few quirks of the latest design for the Post Oak stretch of the light-rail line late last year: It features 7 stations, 5 gated crossings, and in all close to 2 dozen traffic signals along the 1.7-mile path from Richmond Ave. to the 610 West Loop. It also blocks all instances of that staple of sprawl-style shopping-center development: the non-intersection left turn.

Had Metro been communicating its plans to the property owners? Had the property owners been relaying any information they received from the transit agency to their tenants?

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Friday, February 26, 2010

A Whole New Ball Game: Fingers Back and Open for Business

Almost a year after shutting down all its operations, Finger Furniture — or at least another company using the same name and run by the same family — is open again. Owner Rodney Finger is claiming the newly renovated 600,000-sq.-ft. facility at 4001 Gulf Fwy. at Cullen near Eastwood is now the biggest furniture store in Texas. And that’ll likely be true for a bit longer — until the warehouse portion of that million-sq.-ft. Rooms To Go on I-10 past Katy opens in another month or so.

But at 200,000 sq. ft., Finger’s showroom is 5 times the size of the one at Rooms To Go. And then there’s that museum inside:

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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The Coming Migration of the Buffalo Grille?

   

Is the Buffalo Grille, left as the lone strip-center survivor at the corner of Bissonnet and Buffalo Speedway after the recent invasion of the new H-E-B Buffalo Market, looking to shuffle off to a new location? An H-E-B representative did tell the West U city council the restaurant would stay where it’s been for the last 26 years — but that was last May. More recently, restaurant co-owner Mac McAleer says H-E-B managers have “expressed concerns” about there not being enough parking for the grocery store. So he’s looking into a possible new location for the West U breakfast joint — namely, a portion of the former JMH Market less than a mile to the southwest, at the corner of Edloe and Rice Blvd. “McAleer said the restaurant has not received official word from the grocery store about what will happen in April 2011 when its lease expires. There’s still the chance that The Buffalo Grille will stay put, but the family is exploring all its options . . . ‘They’re worried some of our customers are taking their spots, and their customers are going over to Kroger, which is obviously their biggest competitor,’ he said.” [Instant News West U; previously on Swamplot]

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Friday, February 19, 2010

The Best Buy in Meyerland

   

No, that isn’t another gun store with shooting range moving into the empty Circuit City space at the Meyerland Plaza shopping center. Reports a reader: “There has been some activity in the empty space lately, and today I asked a worker who was out in the parking lot what store was going in, and he said Best Buy.” [Swamplot inbox]

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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Dressing Up Those Little Montrose Drive-Ups

Vespa-riding Montrosian Brittanie Holland is curious about two retail buildings in her ’hood recently dressed up for lease:

We live in the northeast part of the Montrose. I was sad when the Hyde Park Supermarket shut down (across from Ziggy’s on Taft and Fairview) because they sold St. Arnold’s and Mexican Coke and were within walking distance. Plus the Pakistani (?) guys who worked there were so nice and knew me by name. Back when Ziggy’s was BYOB having the store there was, well, convenient.

The building has been vacant since summer but over the past few months workers have painstakingly removed all the original brick, refurbished the structure and the rebricked it with most of the original brick. It’s kind of an interesting mid-century building — it looks like it might once have been a garage, and there is a sign for business lease outside but I can’t believe the owners would do all that refurbishing without a [tenant] in mind. This is right down the street from Boheme and the new Deans, and has ample parking, so maybe they’re hoping to draw some similar high-brow ventures? Is Midtown continuing it’s fast encroachment on my filthy Montrose? (We’ll always have Lola’s. Hopefully.)

The other building probably needed a much more extensive cleaning:

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Shooting in Circuit City

   

This summer gun store the Arms Room will be moving into the former Circuit City store it just bought, off the northbound I-45 feeder just south of FM 646 in League City. The store specializes in military collectibles, concealed handguns, and tactical weapons. At 20,000 square feet, the new store will sell firearms and have a 15-lane indoor shooting range rated for rifles and pistols. Sounds a little like a bowling alley. ‘It is very similar,’ said general manager Travis James. ‘You’re in a lane for an hour and you shoot to your heart’s content. You just dont have to change your shoes.’” [Prime Property]

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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

What Could Possibly Take the Place of Chicken N Egg Roll?

A hungry reader writes in wanting to know about the new concrete-block building going up at 2802 S. Shepherd, just across Harold St. from the Houston Wine Merchant. Half of the lot is the site of the former Chicken N Egg Roll. Because the neighboring house on Harold was carted away, the new lot is twice as deep.

I have confirmed that it is a commercial establishment, but can’t find any additional info. Do you know? It looks too small to be a restaurant, but one can hope . . .

Here’s one clue our reader will be happy to hear: The original demolition report from last April listed the owner or occupant of the property as Toyama Japanese Restaurant.

Photo: Swamplot inbox

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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Kay O’Toole’s House in Back

Ubiquitous design blogger Joni Webb hyperventilates over the March issue of Veranda magazine, which features actual interior pics of the house Kay O’Toole had built behind her Kay O’Toole Antiques & Eccentricities shop. The shop is in the building with the rounded corners next to the Firkin & Phoenix Pub parking lot at 1921 Westheimer:

I had heard the blogosphere mumbling about this Veranda showing Kay O’Toole’s new house and that was what had my mouth watering like Edward’s whenever Bella is around. Honestly, I’ve been waiting over two years for this issue!

O’Toole owns a French antique shop housed in a 1920s brick building that was once home to several different businesses. Through the years, she eventually acquired the entire building and tore down the dividing walls – creating a long and narrow haven for the best of what France, and now Belgium, Sweden, and Italy have to offer.

O’Toole’s single-story, one-bedroom stucco home — designed by Murphy Mears Architects — is another long and narrow haven, modeled after something O’Toole saw in New Orleans’s French Quarter: It’s one room deep, and backs up to the property’s back fence.

Couldn’t Webb have just charmed her way inside, camera in hand? Oh, she’d tried that:

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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

The Suburban Commercial Real Estate Bust Is Kiddie Paradise

   

With the tens of millions of square feet of vacant commercial real estate lining our roadways out in the ‘burbs, I am seeing a glut of “bounce houses.” Combine free or reduced rents, low start-up costs and thousands of laid-off middle and upper management types reaching career endpoints due to layoffs, I think we are experiencing a new economic bubble.” [Lou Minatti] Photo: Monkey Joe’s

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