This little lot on Almeda Rd. is being cleared for a 2-story office building. Between Blodgett and Wentworth and smushed between the Spanish Village Restaurant and a 2-story brick home, the lot at 4716 Almeda is just a bit more than a tenth of an acre. A replat application submitted to the city indicates that the proposed 3,000-sq.-ft. building is meant to be the new standalone headquarters of Mayberry Homes, which will be relocating from a retail center just down the street at 4412 Almeda.
More urban dominion: The unwanted vegetation has been ripped out and the foundations poured for the 8-pack of townhouses going by Rosewood Estates, developed by McCollum City Homes and Urban Living. These are just south of Wheeler and west of Almeda in Museum Park on a lot cornered by Rosewood and Jackson. And they appear to stick with that if-it-ain’t-broke 3-bedroom, 4-story design that might by now seem pretty darn familiar. Prices here, anyway, range from $489,000 for a 2,224-sq.-ft. one that faces Rosewood St. to $499,000 for the 2,286-sq.-ft. one that overlooks the shared drivepath and Jackson St.
Here it is, the new corporate headquarters that Southwestern Energy is building for itself in Springwoods Village, just south of the new corporate headquarters that ExxonMobil is building for itself. Construction, reports Fuel Fix, began this week. Speculation about the building began in April, though, when a film-noir-ish black-and-white version of this rendering was leaked via HAIF. It appears that the only difference — you know, besides the Oz-like transformation to the realism of color — is the addition of Southwestern Energy signage, including that little formulaic icon to the left. The 10-story building and 7-story garage, where the company will consolidate about 1,000 Houston employees, will occupy 25.6 acres alongside I-45 and should be ready to go in 2014.
Though that fuzzy border on this rendering suggest this is a gated community you’d see only in your dreams — or maybe in one of its namesake’s illustrated field guides — it appears that Audubon Hollow in Briar Hollow is already under construction. Plans describe 22 3-story houses, designed by Houston’s Butler Brothers, built on 3 acres on Briar Hollow Ln., tucked in that area bound by the Loop, Buffalo Bayou and Memorial Park, and San Felipe, west of River Oaks.
First things first: Here’s the new location of Morningside Thai. Hoping to open June 22, says owner Ying Roberts, the no-longer-on-Morningside, no-longer-eponymous restaurant can be found at 2473 S. Braeswood Blvd., inside the Kirby Glen Retail Center, north of OST, right where the South Main neighborhood bumps into University Place. Got that? Of course, the Braeswood address might be a tad misleading in this case, since the restaurant actually faces Kirby Dr.
H-E-B Montrose Market architects (and International Coffee Company Building renovators) Lake Flato designed these 4-bedroom, 3.5-bath Nagle St. townhouses that are going up in East Downtown. They’re coming in at 2 sizes: 3,375 sq. ft. for the endcaps with screened-in terraces and 3,664 sq. ft. for the ones scrunched in the middle. Developed by Lovett Homes, the townhouses face the 700 block of Nagle between Capitol and Rusk, just east of BBVA Compass Stadium. One of the larger townhouses, listed at $549,000, has already gone pending.
It would seem that McDonald’s has resolved the steely staring contest between these 2 signs from 2 different eras, having gone ahead and ushered out the old restaurant here on Elgin and Cullen near the U of H campus to put up a brand-new one, a regional rep from the company confirms. No renderings of the next generation are available yet, but the rep says that it should be open in time for the fall semester.
Photo: Allyn West
Overlooking Hogg Park and White Oak Bayou, the old Robert E. Lee Elementary school is being renovated into a community center for the Near Northside. The school was designed by Alfred C. Finn and dates to 1919 and 1920, though it’s been vacant in this historic district since 2002. Architecture firm PGAL is preserving 3 of the building’s walls and decorative geegaws as well as the arched entryway that faces South St.; new space for what’s been named the Leonel J. Castillo Community Center is being built out the back, as this photo shows.
What’s this sandbox right beside the Hungry’s Cafe and Bistro in Rice Village going to be? A Hungry’s. An employee at the not-that-old one next door at 2356 Rice Blvd. says it will be demolished and turned into a parking lot for what a rendering on a sign at this construction site shows is a 2-story new one.
Hungry’s, you’ll remember, is owned by an entity controlled by Fred Sharifi, who earlier this year purchased and now appears to have plans to redevelop the Gramercy Place Apartments on the 200 block of Portland St. — just a few miles away on the east side of Montrose Blvd. — into townhomes.
A rendering of the new Hungry’s wasn’t made immediately available; what follows after the jump is a photo of what’s on that sign at the construction site:
A pair of Swamplot readers, employees at Hughes Hangar across the street and Kwik Lube next door, and the Facebook page of late-night weekend jitney service Houston Wave all have heard that this building going up on Washington Ave will be a new Sonic. But a rep from the company can’t confirm the location, saying yesterday that there is nothing to add about “the specific possibility” of a Sonic here at 2720 Washington, and there doesn’t appear to be any tell-tale signage up yet.
This rendering shows one of 4 charitable duplexes planned to go up in Meyerland that will be set aside for single-mother families. Construction began late last week on property that’s owned St. John’s Presbyterian Church at 5020 W. Bellfort Ave., between Willowbend and S. Post Oak Blvd., just outside the Loop. One of the 8 units will also be home to an on-site caseworker.
Flanked by a pair of churches, these stick frames just popped up in the Third Ward. Plans for the development called Bastrop Plaza show a row of 9 townhouses on a vacant lot at the intersection of Webster and Bastrop. That’s a block west of Dowling St., 2 blocks south of the Gulf Fwy., and 2 5 north of Emancipation Park, primed for a very expensive redevelopment project of its own this summer. A sign at the construction site here announces that the townhouses will start at $260,000.
A reader sends this photo of the site prep going on at the fenced-in empty lot that made a recent cameo in that Montrose Dancing Rollerblader featurette. Owned since 2006 by the Aga Khan Foundation, which has said it planned to build an Ismaili Center here on the flood-prone makeshift dog park on Montrose between W. Dallas and Allen Pkwy., the property hasn’t seen much activity — other than the dancing, of course — for awhile.
Until this week, that is. And now the reader wants to know what the deal might be: “Looks like a lot of development is happening in this block. I read . . . about the development on the AIG side [of Montrose], but now the other side, next to those Amli apartments, seems to be breaking ground on something large. Any idea what’s gonna be placed there?”
Photo: Swamplot inbox
