The crane at 2727 Kirby is coming down today and tomorrow, reports a reader who’s been watching the construction.
A larger version of this up-to-date photo showing the incredible shrinking construction crane — and a rendering of the completed condo tower — are waiting for you after the jump.
“Sonoma is mystery,” proclaims Randall Davis near the end of an excruciatingly long promotional video posted at the project’s recently updated website. Part of the mystery, of course, has been when — or whether — construction might actually begin on the 7-story condos-shops-and-parking Rice Village layer cake. Since the buildings on the site were demolished and the block of Bolsover between Kelvin and Morningside was fenced in last fall, not much has happened.
Nancy Sarnoff has some details on the delay:
Sonoma, an upscale condo and retail project planned in Rice Village, was supposed to break ground in April.
The land has been cleared to start building, but the developers have a loan commitment for just half of what it will take to build it.
“We’re ready to put a shovel in the ground,” said Julie Tysor, president of Lamesa Corp., owner of the project. “The speed of the changing lending markets wasn’t really anticipated by any of the people involved.”
Rendering of Sonoma: Ziegler Cooper Architects
CANDLEWOOD GLEN: RENO OR DEMO? Near Northwest residents ask City Council for help with the squalid Candlewood Glen and Candlelight Trails complexes. “A sign posted at the entrance to the complex would suggest there were plans to reopen the buildings under a new name. They would be called Palm Terrace, and phase one was scheduled for construction during the summer of 2008. But it’s now August, and there is no sign of construction.” [11 News, previously in Swamplot]
A reader asks:
Has anyone else heard the rumor that Mosaic Hermann Park’s South Tower (already under construction) is going all rental once complete?
It would be kinda cute if the second condo tower did end up switching to apartments, since the first tower went in the opposite direction:
[Phillips Development managing director Donald] Phillips says the company financed the first Mosaic tower as a rental property because that was the only way to secure funding.
“We did whatever we had to do to get the thing built,” he says.
Photo: Aerial photo of Mosaic from June: Aero Photo
City officials posted signs at the Gables of Inwood Apartments near Antoine Forest yesterday notifying residents that they need to vacate the property by Monday. The owner of the 165-unit complex, Collins Ofoegbu of El Sobrante, California, has received notices of more than 240 violations from city inspectors since purchasing the property in 2006.
Some received the news from orange “notice to vacate” signs affixed to their doors. The signs also warned residents that power would be disconnected Monday.
“I need, like, two or three months,” said an agitated Jolanda Hernandez, who waved a recent rent receipt while complaining in Spanish. “I need time so I can move out of here.”
Matt Stiles’s report in the Chronicle indicates there are also problems at a closer-in property with a much larger group of owners: the Park Memorial Condominiums near the corner of Memorial and Detering. Stiles says city inspectors planned to post notices at the condominiums at 5292 Memorial warning residents that the parking garage is unsafe and “may experience catastrophic failure at any time.”
After the jump: More highlights from reporter Matt Stiles’s personal collection of dangerous-apartment photos!
Group LSR, aka InnerLoopCondos.com, wants to build a new condo building in Montrose — and you get to play the stylist! What should the new development look like? Entry-arches-gone-crazy Apartment Romanesque? Inigo Jones’s Last Stand at the Alamo? Shangri-La Festival Palace Moderne? Mountainside Office Park Tinted-Glass Tech? Or something a little more home-ly, like that building with the curvy hairdos they’ve done a couple of versions of already?
Yeah, it’s kinda hard to choose, but don’t sweat it — you can vote for as many of the six choices (shown above) as you want! They’re all pictured (and yes, they’re the only options) in an online questionnaire sent out by the company earlier this month, apparently meant to gauge consumer interest in a development the company is planning on the 800 block of West Alabama, near Audubon Place. Yes, that includes the site of the recently shuttered Bistro Vino. As a commenter to our earlier story deduced, Group LSR is the mysterious “unnamed residential developer.”
The survey sez:
Our decision to develop this project will greatly depend upon the feedback we receive from Houston condominium buyers regarding the location. . . .
If you were in the market to purchase, please indicate what type of architecture would you prefer in your next condominium home?
Your theme choices matter!
Images: InnerLoopCondos.com
This updated rendering of Regent Square’s central square, showing a ghost-like tower looming in the not-so-distant distance, has been posted to CBRE’s leasing page for the project, notes sharp-eyed HAIF user ChannelTwoNews. A reader sent it to us, too.
What is it?
Two condo towers are planned for the first phase of the project. In a rendering leaked to us back in May, the condo towers are are drawn as shadowy boxes. But this new ghost tower isn’t one of them.
After the jump: the ghost of Regent Square’s future!
Lou Minatti notes that the construction crane parked on the site of the Park 8 condo tower project on the west side of Beltway 8 between Bellaire and Beechnut has at long last been dismantled and removed. Is it time to say goodbye to the Land of Oz?
More bad news for fans of the 3-tower (plus hospital and strip center) project: The video originally embedded in our story about the project from last year is down too. But don’t worry . . . YouTube has a copy! See it again — and relive some of that Oz highrise magic — after the jump.
Well, where were we? This week’s mystery sky-pad fetched individual guesses of: Greenway Plaza, Museum District/Med Center, “near Woodway,” Gessner and Memorial, Memorial between Shepherd and Westcott, The Woodlands, Champions, Champion Forest, Riverside Terrace, Sugarland, Missouri City, River Oaks, Glendower Court (actually, “North of Westheimer and probably west of Shepherd, in that town-house filled area south of River Oaks”), and the Galleria.
Some of you guessed particular buildings. Two of you took a stab at Regency House, 2 1/2 fell for Four Leaf Towers, and 2 said it was the Timber Top. We also had guesses of the Huntingdon, the Willowick, Bayou Bend Towers, “the highrise near the Medical Center and Hermann Park” (the Parklane or the Warwick Towers or the Mosaic?), the Endeavour, “a small mid-rise apartment complex” on Augusta between San Felipe and Westheimer, the St. Clair Condos near the Post Oak YMCA, 14 or 15 Greenway Plaza, Hermann Towers (?), and the Spires.
The winner is LawrenceDean, who was first to name the Timber Top highrise in Champion Forest — and threw in this bit of color commentary:
I’m going to go with this being a glimpse of the lifestyle of a (very old) northside baller…..
However, this came after some excellent advance work by Bernard, who is apparently expert in staring out of windows:
I don’t see how it can be “in townâ€. Take a look out the window. There’s nothing but green space. It’s hard to imagine a high rise in town that wouldn’t have a view of at least a couple tall buildings popping up from the tree tops.
It’s clearly a two story unit. Must be a penthouse. But it doesn’t look too high up. The building can’t be more than 15-20 stories.
Maybe it’s on the west side of town with a west facing view. It would suck to have a penthouse facing the wrong direction. . . .
There are two patches of green out the window. Is that a golf course? Maybe some forward thinking developer stole (I mean borrowed and never repaid) some S&L money and built a mini-high-rise out in The Woodlands or Champions. I don’t know those ares very well.
If only you had! That’s enough for an honorable mention, though!
Special recognition goes to our two fully authorized troublemakers this week — Jeff and GoogleMaster — who identified the listing to us privately and then vied to keep easily swayed guessers focused on inside-the-Loop neighborhoods. This loopy comment by Jeff, in particular, is priceless:
Seriously, only an Inner Looper would have elephant tusks next to their couch.
After some initial overreaching, this Timber Top penthouse has been sitting on the market for quite some time. How long? See our summary:
ASHBY HIGHRISE: ONE PERMIT AWAY FROM APPROVAL “Having cleared six of seven departmental reviews, dating back July 30, the project only lacks clearance from Public Works and Engineering’s traffic section.” Developer Matthew Morgan says Buckhead Investment Partners will address four outstanding traffic concerns and resubmit the project for approval soon. [West University Examiner; previously]
It didn’t garner much local attention, but a certain local condo building — along with a few close friends — made a star appearance in last week’s big mortgage-scam announcement by the FBI. More than 400 people were charged in 144 separate mortgage fraud cases nationwide over the last 3 months as part of the agency’s “Operation Malicious Mortgage.” Six of those arrests were in Houston:
This indictment charges Houston-area residents Frankthea Annette Williams, Ishmael Boyd Laryea, Charles Joseph-DeShawn Wilson, Kristen Anne Way and Robert Wilfred Stanley, and Tasha Rene Bellow, of Burbank, Calif., with engaging in a scheme to defraud by providing false and fraudulent information to residential lenders to induce the lenders to fund the purchase of single family homes and condominium units.
11 News reporter Allison Triarsi describes how the scams worked:
The suspects would find a home for sale, let’s say $200,000.
They would then get a phony appraisal that would almost double the home’s actual value. In that case, $400,000.
The culprits would then look for an investor. That’s someone to actually put the house in their name using their good credit for the closing and title.
A bank would then loan the money for the house, which has the phony appraisal value. The crooks would then pay the seller the $200,000 asking price and pocket the other $200,000.
Here’s a question. If you were trying to run this scam, where would you find properties you could get appraised for as much as twice their actual value? Sure, Houston had some price runups . . . and yes, appraisals can be played. But why fake something you don’t have to?
A reader sends photos of some recent construction on the garage podium beneath the Cosmopolitan tower and asks:
What are those three giant urinals affixed to the east exterior wall of Randall Davis’ latest glass-clad erection, the one on Post Oak where James Coney Island used to be? . . .
Where is the Colossal Statue of Constantine when you need him? (Well, he’s in Rome, but that’s no help to Post Oak Boulevard!)
Sure, there’s the vaguely Roman theming going on with the marketing for Davis’s next tower across the street, the Titan. But these new constructions might be something much more contemporary . . . think Marcel Duchamp by way of Claes Oldenburg: The big fountains!
Below: the Colossal Head of Constantine . . . and the Colossal Heads of the Cosmopolitan, on display!
Trammell Crow Residential is planning a new apartment building on the current site of the RR Donnelley printing company building on S. Shepherd, some sleuthing neighbors tell us.
The printing company sits between two cartoon condos near W. Dallas: Randall Davis’s Gotham and Renoir. The site for the apartments will include all of the land currently owned by Donnelley, extending from Shepherd through the parking lot east to Gross St. The Nazarene Missionary Baptist Church on Newhouse St. may own a small piece of the parking lot, reports an email making the rounds in the neighborhood.
Trammell Crow, which runs the Alexan apartment chain, is reportedly still in the early stages of planning . . . though apparently far enough along for the company’s planners to request some variances from the city. One variance request
is to not have to widen Newhouse to the now required standard of 50 ft. . . . To do so would adversely impact the church and the one townhouse at the end of Newhouse.
More details and photos 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
There were three Meyerland guesses in this week’s game . . . though at least two of them were likely tongue-in-cheek. The rest: one each for the Museum District, “just west of the Galleria,” Upper Kirby, the greater Galleria area, Gessner between Memorial and Briar Forest, the Bering-Augusta area, Montrose, River Oaks, Memorial Dr. and Chimney Rock, Hillcroft/Voss, Legend Lane, Bunker Hill, Tanglewood, north of the Galleria and west of River Oaks, Bissonnet between Kirby and Newcastle, Nantucket between San Felipe and Woodway, and Camp Hudson.
Y’all know where to find the seventies-model townhouses! Most of you figured it was one — despite the best efforts of K, who turned out to be this week’s secret disinformation-spewing agent. She sent in the correct address and then posted this plausible but misleading argument:
I know it looks like a townhouse, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t: this looks just like the houses in my area that have atriums/front courtyards that are covered in in ivy, especially when they’re on busy streets like Gessner.
Also, the bedrooms are way too large for this to be a townhome. I’m guessing — not Meyerland this time! — that it’s a two-story late-1960s era single-family home with a very blockish front/exterior and a courtyard or two that we aren’t being shown.
Great work, K! Sadly, though, your subversive talents were not enough to throw off this week’s winner, marmer, who got the right neighborhood with one of his guesses:
Townhome. Older, probably not on top of a first-floor garage. You wouldn’t build such a constrained metal stair in a “real†house. Too awkward and too industrial. I’m OK with the room sizes if the bedrooms are all upstairs and the living areas doswnstairs. So, where? Tanglewood.
North of the Galleria and west of River Oaks.Or I could be wrong and it could be on Bissonnet, between Kirby and Newcastle
Wrong side of the Loop . . . and it’s actually a condo, not a townhouse . . . but it’s still good enough for a win! River Hollow, Briar Hollow, Post Oak Park . . . what’s your favorite name for this area?
Honorable mentions this week go to ERM — for pointing out that some of the bedroom windows look onto the central stair — and last week’s winner, Jeff, for these mostly accurate observations:
This is nicer than some of the queso we’ve seen before. It looks like a townhouse to me, but not new construction. The cheap looking metal rails on the staircase suggests something from the 70’s. Also, the roof directly above the stairs looks to be a skylight, something we typically dont see with new construction. My guess is its an older place that is situated in a nice area to warrant the cost of new floors, kitchen, etc.
After the jump: The actual name of the actual seventies-era condo development. Plus: That pool shot you’ve been waiting for!
