HOUSTON – (Realty News Report) – A Nashville-based developer is planning a mixed-use project with a 36-story residential tower and a mid-rise office building in Houston’s Inner Loop.
The project will be developed on a two-acre parcel just south of Westheimer at the northeast corner of Kirby Drive and Kipling Street.
Southern Land Company, which has developed a number of projects in North Texas, will develop a 318–unit, high-rise apartment tower and 75,000-SF of office space atop a parking garage and 22,000 SF of retail.
The development contributes to an urban neighborhood known as the Upper Kirby District.
Upper Kirby has accumulated dense multifamily, multiple high-rises with ground-level retail and restaurants and enough walkability to provide a bona fide live/work/play environment.
“The appeal of Upper Kirby is undeniable,” said Tim Downey, founder and CEO of Southern Land Company. “We could not have found a better place to introduce an SLC community in Houston. With all SLC communities, we focus on creating extraordinary places in coveted locations where walkability and conveniences are at the forefront, and this site certainly fits the bill.”
The site had been home of a Wells Fargo bank building, which has been demolished. Houston developer Robert Clay had considered developing a medical building there, but those plans have been dropped.
The Upper Kirby District has grown dense with multifamily development, condominiums, retail and restaurants, an ideal platform for the new development by Southern Land Company.
“What they are doing is very appropriate for that site,” says Houston architect Scott Ziegler of Ziegler Cooper Architects, which designed the 30-story 2727 Kirby condominium tower next door to the Southern Land property.
Other Upper Kirby developments include the Hanover River Oaks residential tower, the Arrive River Oaks retail and residential mid-rise – and closer to Richmond Avenue, a 25-story apartment with 13 stories of office space that was formerly called Kirby Collection, but is now named Arrive Upper Kirby.
Multiple redevelopment opportunities, such as single-story retail with spacious surface parking lots, line either side of Kirby Drive. A large tract at Kirby and Norfolk awaits development. Another significant parcel of cleared land at Kirby and West Alabama had been planned as an urban H-E-B grocery, but the status of that site has not been announced. With West University Place on the south and River Oaks on the north, Kirby Drive has solid-gold demographics. A Whole Foods is a couple of blocks south of the Southern Land site, 2801 Kirby.
Southern Land Company has long had a footprint in Texas, with a regional office in Plano and several projects currently active in other Texas markets:
- Deco 969, Fort Worth’s first high-rise residential tower in more than 30 years, is slated for completion in late 2023.
- Tucker Hill is a master-planned community with traditional neighborhood design in McKinney.
- Lunayora is an intimate luxury home community with just 28 homesites in the Hill Country community of Dripping Springs, where all homes will be built by SLC Homes, SLC’s in-house homebuilding group. (Dripping Springs was the location of the first Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic in 1973, which featured Bob Dylan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Neil Young, June Carter Cash and Waylon Jennings.)
“Texas has been good to us, and we believe we have been good to residents in the Texas cities where we’ve built before,” said Downey. “This (Upper Kirby) project will follow suit.”
July 26, 2023 Realty News Report Copyright 2023
Photos by Ralph Bivins, Realty News Report Copyright 2023.
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File: Big Development in Inner Loop