Hines Plans a Shiny New 18-Story Office Building Across San Felipe from River Oaks
Hines is planning to build an 18-story office building on a 3-lane section of San Felipe between Shepherd and Kirby, across the street from tony River Oaks. The site is the 35,000-sq.-ft. former lushy garden and grounds of a Vermont Commons home, which features several trees and at least one giant oak. “No one knows anything about this,” a source tells Swamplot. “They think a few nice townhouses are about to rise from the earth. That is the story that’s circulating the hood.”
The site is on the southwest corner of San Felipe and Spann. The proposed building, designed by HKS and Ziegler Cooper, is meant to include approximately 170,000 sq. ft. of office space in 10 office stories; they’ll be sitting atop an 8-level parking garage. The main street entrance appears to front Spann St. Randall Davis’s now-reportedly “sold out” Chateau Ten 10-unit condo building is going up across that street, at 2221 Welch. The leaked rendering above is a preliminary design.
Hines appears not to have announced the project to neighbors, though obsessive Googlers might have come across a company press release from late last month that happened to drop the name of the project, which also happens to be its address: 2229 San Felipe. “The neighbors are only now starting to learn the truth,” claims a source. “They were led to believe that nice River-Oaks-type luxury townhomes were going to built on that corner.
Who knows who started that rumor, but that’s what we heard . . . To say that people are upset is an understatement . . . it’s going to be another Ashby Highrise brawl. . . . The River Oaks folks are not going to like tenants looking down on their pools, backyards, terraces, balconies . . .”
An entity connected to Hines bought the property last November. The company expects to complete the building at the end of 2014 or the beginning of 2015.
http://swamplot.com/hines-plans-a-sh...ks/2013-05-16/