TRADER JOE’S IS NOW LOOKING TO OPEN STORES IN HOUSTON You heard that right. The Dallas Morning News is announcing that private-label grocer Trader Joe’s plans to open 30 10 stores in Texas and is now actively scouting sites. The California-based chain is reportedly “looking at multiple locations in Dallas, Houston and Austin.” The first store would likely open in Dallas, within the year. [Dallas Morning News]
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Tag: Retail
Not even 3 years after the store merged with a local competitor, the owners of Harold’s in the Heights has announced it is going out of business. Harold Wiesenthal founded the independent men’s clothing shop in 1950, a date its storefront at the corner of 19th St. and Ashland St. still screams daily to passersby. Since 2008, the store has been a part of Norton Ditto. Wiesenthal’s successor — his son Michael — left the company early last year.
- About us [Harold’s]
Photo: Gordon Tillman
And now, from roving Swamplot photographer Candace Garcia: exclusive pics of the brand new windows recently installed on the formerly blank south wall facing Hawthorne St. of the Kroger at 3300 Montrose, as part of the grocery store’s continuing renovations. Last we checked, construction was scheduled to be complete next month.
C’mon, we all know what the problem’s been with the old Art Deco River Oaks Shopping Center on West Gray, just east of Shepherd: The place was too black-and-white, the signs were too damn small, and it didn’t have enough turrets. Hey, nothing a little forehead lift and a generous slathering of EIFS can’t fix! Got some can’t-sell brick up there? Time for a little arch-ee-textural adjustment! It’ll look just like stucco — with all those control joints you love, plus they’ll be painting the new glop a nice Pearland-y mustard color. All that and a new wash of beige paint over the rest of the place should make folks driving in from newer suburbs feel more at home when they visit — and may have the added bonus of attracting a few of those nail salons and check-cashing outlets the place has been so sorely missing.
A view of the mix at the corner strip center at Westheimer and Fountainview, where a driver crashed this morning into the storefront of the Yogurtland at 5901 Westheimer, then plowed through an interior wall into the Any Lab Test Now! location next door.
Photo: KHOU
When it opens this summer, the new Microsoft Store in the Houston Galleria will be the company’s 10th retail location. Won’t that be awfully close to the Apple Store? That’s been part of the game plan since the folks behind Windows, Office, and the Xbox hatched their retail scheme in February 2009. The only Microsoft stores so far are in the booming metropolises of Scottsdale, Arizona; Mission Viejo, San Diego, and Costa Mesa, California; Lone Tree, Colorado; Oak Brook, Illinois; Bloomington, Minnesota (at the Mall of America); and the company’s hometown of Bellevue, Washington.
Photo: Microsoft
The apartment complex the Richdale Group is planning to put in place of the just-vacated Houston Ballet building at 1916 West Gray will indeed have retail space on the ground floor — if you count the facility’s leasing office, that is. Also right in front on the first floor: 2 apartments and 4 head-in parking spaces, for potential tenants only. The parking garage will go in back, accessed from Bell St. A plan for the development, labeled the Graybelle subdivision, was submitted as part of a variance request for this Thursday’s planning commission meeting. The developers are requesting a 15-ft. setback along West Gray in place of the usual 25 ft. requirement. The lot is directly west of Randall Davis’s gargoyle-festooned Metropolis condo building.
A buyer has at last been found for the carefully constructed Forbidden City exhibit at the shuttered Forbidden Gardens attraction in Katy. Well . . . for a portion of it, at least. Ben Cornblath is director of the museum and cultural center that closed under mysterious circumstances in February, then held an open-to-the-public selloff of many of its holdings. He tells Swamplot that a group of people in an “environmental” company associated with the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo has expressed interest in . . . that big shed that’s been standing over the model and protecting it from things like sleet, Hurricane Ike, and the Houston sun. The park is still awaiting the company’s bid. Cornblath says such structures appear to be a rare commodity around the metropolitan area, and this one has a strong track record of sheltering an entire miniature Middle Kingdom city for nearly a decade and a half. But getting the steel structure out of there won’t be easy: The move may require a crane.
What about that thing beneath the sought-after roof, the one-twentieth-scale model of Beijing’s Forbidden City?
COMMENT OF THE DAY: WHY WALK, WHEN YOU CAN DRIVE? “If I live in a ‘walkable’ neighborhood I have access to a couple of restaurants and maybe a couple of services but with my CAR I have access to THOUSANDS of restaurants, services, venues, malls, etc. without having to use the same one twice . . . Why would I give a sh*t about a ‘walkable’ neighborhood?!?!??!?” [commonsense, commenting on Apartment Building Replacing Tavern on Gray Won’t Have Any Retail, But Really Wants To Hug the Street Anyway]
COMMENT OF THE DAY: DOWN IN FRONT “Actually, ground floor retail is an uphill struggle. Apartment managers want to manage apartments. Shopping center managers want to manage retail tenants. Plus, with the slim profile of this lot…where 10 extra feet is needed for the parking…putting 50 or 100 foot deep retailers in the garage would be even worse. And, despite the claims of the poster several spots up, mixed use retail space is a very hard sell. Dallas pushed several developers to include ground floor retail in new complexes, and most of them sit idle. The fact is, Houston is capable of separating the two, so developers and retailers prefer to do so. Only in dense urban areas do retailers attempt to carve out space wherever they can find it. Despite the love affair with mixed use retail, it is still a very rare bird . . . especially in new development. . . .” [Dave, commenting on Apartment Building Replacing Tavern on Gray Won’t Have Any Retail, But Really Wants To Hug the Street Anyway]
Maybe that spec retail block at the Highland Village Shopping Center wasn’t good enough for Apple, after all. A couple of readers have written in to report that the never-been-occupied eastern portion of the relatively recent building at 4012-4018 Westheimer — where Houston’s first-ever mall-free Apple Store is supposed to go — has been torn down completely. The foundation and portions of the parking lot have been jack-hammered, writes one reader: “It’s like someone took a big pair of scissors and cut it off, through the beams, etc. The rest of the structure that houses Sprinkles, Paper Source, and what will be Restoration Hardware is still there. But the end where the Apple Store is/was going to be is gone.”
A permit for the “partial” demo of the building at 4012 Westheimer appeared on Swamplot’s Daily Demolition Report back on Valentine’s Day. An Apple retail fan site notes that according to its sources the Highland Village store when it opens “will bear some resemblance to the Scottsdale Quarter store.” Which looks like this:
Opened over the weekend: a 1,500-sq.-ft. space at 6115 Kirby in the Rice Village that its owners are claiming is the country’s first non-toxic retail paint store. The Green Painter, a project of green-building supply house and organic-mattress showroom New Living, takes over a former tile store next door to its parent company. Partner Jeff Kaplan says most of the paint and coatings sold at the Green Painter — including its own NOVOC brand and a lower-priced line of contractor-grade paints — won’t have any volatile organic compounds at all, but the store does carry one line of paints for cabinets, trim, and exteriors that qualifies as a low-VOC product.
- Paint & Coatings [New Living]
- The Green Painter [Facebook]
- Buckets of green for painters [Houston Chronicle]
Photo: Adam Brackman
The longtime owners of the now-shuttered original Otto’s Bar B Que and Hamburgers on Memorial Dr. filed suit on Tuesday against their former broker, Cushman & Wakefield executive director David Cook, claiming that he failed to let them know about several offers to buy their property. As a result, the lawsuit claims, the owners ended up selling their real-estate holdings for — and settling into retirement with — only a third of the money they might have otherwise received. Marcus and June Sofka originally listed their restaurant at 5502 Memorial Dr. and some adjacent property with Cook in August 2007. Two months later, according to the suit, the Ponderosa Land Development Co. submitted a written offer for the land to Cook for $105 a sq. ft. But the Sofkas claim they didn’t hear about that offer until much later. Why wouldn’t Cook have given them such good news?
HARTS GOING, GOING, GOING . . . TO PRISON 
Auctioneers and swindlers Jerry and Wynonne Hart will begin serving their 14-year prison sentences “within days,” after an appeals court reversed a decision that would have given the former owners of the Hart Galleries on South Voss a new trial. The Harts pled guilty to “misapplication of fiduciary property” 2 years ago, in return for prosecutors dropping theft and money-laundering charges against them. Prosecutors claim the Harts sold customers’ goods at auction but regularly underpaid or otherwise finagled their way out of distributing the proceeds. [Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo: Hart Galleries
EVERYTHING WAS GOING FINE AT THE BERRYHILL IN CINCO RANCH — UNTIL THIS HAPPENED 
The Berryhill Baja Grill in Villagio Town Center — that Tuscan-themed shopping center in Cinco Ranch — has closed. “Not hugely newsworthy,” a Swamplot reader admits — except for one little part of the story. According to a lawsuit filed earlier this month by Villagio Partners, the restaurant hasn’t paid its rent in twenty-seven months. Berryhill moved into the shopping center in August 2007 but the franchise’s operators haven’t paid at all since the beginning of 2009, according to a filing with the Harris County District Court. [Ultimate Katy] Photo: Villagio Town Center
