Month: August 2016

Moment, a new luxury apartment tower, has opened in the heart of Chicago’s bustling Streeterville neighborhood. The 45-story, 490-unit building at 545 N. McClurg Court welcomed its first residents in late July, according to international real estate firm Golub & Company, the developer. Designed to meet LEED Silver Standards, Moment also boasts nearly 40,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor amenities, including many thoughtfully designed spaces dedicated to wellness and healthy living.

“We are pleased to add a health and wellness-focused high rise apartment community to this vibrant neighborhood,” said Golub & Company President and CEO Michael Newman. “We have a long tradition of development in Streeterville, and we think Moment is a new and different way to meet the strong demand in this neighborhood for luxury living.”

At Moment, residents can take a mindful break from their daily lives in amenity spaces including the ELEVATE Rooftop Pool + Lounge, the MIND + BODY Wellness Spa, the REJUVENATE Sauna + Steam room, the INVIGORATE Massage Room, the VITALITY Fitness Hub and MEDITATE Yoga Studio, and the SERENITY GARDEN. They also share access to a demonstration kitchen, entertainment gallery, media theatre, coffee and tea bar, a self-service pet spa, a business center, and cabanas and grilling stations.

“At Moment, our busy, health-conscious residents can participate in yoga, massage, swimming and exercise without ever leaving the building,” observed Paula Harris, Golub & Company Principal and Senior Vice President. “By going down the hall instead of across town, you can fit health and wellness activities into a busy schedule.”

The apartments, available in studio, convertible, one-, two- and three-bedroom layouts, feature floor-to-ceiling windows, plank flooring, European-style frameless cabinetry, marble mosaic backsplashes, pearl quartz countertops in kitchen and bath, stainless steel appliances, and in-unit washer and dryer sets.

The silver-blue tower features a contemporary glass and metal exterior wall with taut, flush panels arranged in a pattern of asymmetrical bay windows. This combination of color and geometry provides each apartment with unique urban views and distinguishes the tower from neighboring buildings. The building also includes an attached 290-car parking garage and 5,200 square feet of ground-floor retail.

The architect for Moment is Solomon Cordwell Buenz and the general contractor is Walsh Construction. Construction financing was provided by The PrivateBank (as Agent and Sole Lead Arranger), The Union Labor Life Insurance Company and Prudential Mortgage Capital Company.

About Golub & Company LLC

Since its founding more than 55 years ago, with three generations of professionals working in the business, Golub & Company has built a strong reputation as a trusted co-investor and developer with its many institutional and private capital partners. It’s a reputation based on track record; Golub and its affiliates have owned, leased or managed more than 50 million square feet of commercial, mixed-use and multifamily real estate properties (inclusive of 45,000 residential units), valued in excess of $10 billion located across the United States and internationally. Access more information by visiting www.golubandcompany.com.

Link: Moment, New 45-Story Luxury Apartment Tower, Now Open In Streeterville

Michael Jordan plans to open another Chicago-area restaurant next year.

The Bulls legend will license his name to a new, 8,500-square-foot eatery at Oak Brook 22, a west suburban office complex that has undergone its own rebranding in the last two years.

Michael Jordan’s Restaurant is expected to seat more than 200 and open between the spring and summer of 2017, and will serve as the keystone to a two-year redevelopment plan for the 389,000-square-foot office complex at 1225 W. 22nd St., west of Spring Road and across from Oakbrook Center shopping mall.

The steakhouse will be the fifth one managed by Chicago-based Cornerstone Restaurant Group and Waterbury, Conn.-based Jump Higher LLC.

Chicago-based developer Golub & Co. and Alcion Ventures pitched Cornerstone on the former Oak Brook Executive Plaza, which Golub and Alcion acquired for $60 million in 2014, and they’ve been upgrading meeting spaces, Wi-Fi and other amenities. Golub had been on the hunt for a restaurant tenant when they caught wind that Jordan’s group was looking at suburban locations.

“We went after them,” said John Ferguson, senior vice president at Golub. The lease will run a minimum of 10 years and has options for up to 20 years, he said.

Jordan’s latest restaurant will mark yet another dining collaboration with Cornerstone CEO David Zadikoff, who has had a hand in designing and operating four current Jordan restaurants, including two in Connecticut, one in New York and Chicago’s Michael Jordan Steak House, which opened on Michigan Avenue in 2011, and two that have since shuttered, One Sixtyblue and the namesake restaurant on LaSalle Street.

The Oak Brook deal offers Jordan’s group about $1 million toward renovations, and additional upgrades are expected, possibly featuring high-end wood, stone and glass.

“According to Cornerstone and the architects (DMAC Architecture) it will have somewhat of an interactive kitchen,” Ferguson said. “The restaurants of yesteryear, you couldn’t really see the kitchen; it was always Houdini. And now this will be more open where you can see into it and see the activity, see hustle and bustle. It creates a little more energy inside the restaurant.”

Through a statement, Zadikoff said the menu “will house an array of cuts, from all natural to grass-fed to USDA Prime” and focus on seasonal ingredients. Drinks will include cocktails, domestic craft beers and a wine list that “mirrors Michael Jordan’s tastes and highlights his private collection.”


Link: Michael Jordan’s Oak Brook Restaurant Expected To Open Next Year

Viewed strictly as architecture, there’s not much to see in San Francisco’s latest residential tower. It’s a 32-story container, mostly glass, with white metal sunshades on two sides and multistory terraces on a third.

But if you grade it on the curve — as in the curve of Rincon Hill, with its cluster of high-rise homesteads built in the past decade — the newcomer at Fremont and Folsom streets excels at what its neighbors mostly lack: a straightforward discipline bottom to top and a genuinely civil connection to the street.

The apartment tower dubbed Solaire that opened last month also offers a way to make sense of the cluster of glass skyscrapers that now crowd the Bay Bridge — what works and what doesn’t, both on the ground and in the air, in the nation’s first vertical neighborhood west of Chicago.

Beyond question, the makeover of Rincon Hill has transformed the city’s skyline. So far, though, it’s a terrain of steep shafts rather than a place outsiders might wish to explore.

The scale of change is undeniable, with nine towers above 30 stories having been completed since the Planning Department and Board of Supervisors approved a plan in 2005 that allows buildings as tall as 550 feet in the former industrial zone between Folsom Street and the Bay Bridge. The idea was to clear room for nearly 3,000 additional housing units within the 12-block area, the impact softened by $22 million in street and sidewalk improvements funded by developer fees.

The endgame? To “transform an unattractive and underused environment into an attractive, mixed-use residential neighborhood,” according to the 2005 plan, with pedestrian-scale sidewalks and stoops beneath “slender high-rise residential towers, spaced to allow light and air to streets and maintain an airy feeling to the skyline.”

All but one of the towers envisioned in the plan have been built. The tallest is the 55-story One Rincon at the hill’s summit that looked so startling when it opened in 2008. An additional four have risen within a block’s radius, with an equal number downhill in two luxury projects along Folsom Street between Spear and Beale streets.

Unlike more modest predecessors that wear masonry coats in a nod to the hill’s older structures, the recent crop of high-rises is defined by glass — so much blue and green that from many angles the towers blur one into the next. Viewed head-on, for instance, the new Lumina complex at Folsom and Beale could be two voluptuous pinwheels spinning away from each other. Shift your perspective, and the twins become a bumpy wall.

Or walk up Fremont Street toward Harrison: The pedestrian world pales beneath the icy cliffs.

None of these is a hack job, but few of them aspire to architecture. The idea is to fill the allowable zoning envelope and then coat it in a veneer that looks fresh and new.

In essence, they’re costumed product. And repackaged product, at that.

The latest crop of towers was approved almost a decade ago, just before the 2008 recession put everything on hold. Most of the projects not only went into limbo, they changed hands before the economy improved and construction began. New developers brought in new architects to jazz things up without altering the towers’ dimensions and bringing a new round of hearings.

This explains the arbitrary look of 340 Fremont, redesigned by Handel Architects for Equity Residential with three distinct facades above the base. Two of the three are handsome in their own right, a near-solid weave of white precast concrete and a concave wall of glass sliced by vertical metal fins to deflect sun, but they have nothing to do with the broad glass wall above Fremont Street. Or the twice-redone 45 Lansing; the final version, by HKS for Crescent Heights, sticks to metal and glass with so many nips and tucks that each side seems to clash slightly with the next.

Solaire, by contrast, had one architect and one developer from start to finish.

The city’s Office of Community Infrastructure and Investment sold the site for $30 million in 2013 to Golub, a Chicago developer working with the San Francisco office of the Chicago architecture firm Solomon Cordwell Buenz. The height and bulk limits were spelled out, with one corner reserved for the apartment tower and the east end of the block set aside for eight stories of affordable apartments designed by local firm Santos Prescott for Mercy Housing. Along the north side of the block, the project includes a pedestrian alley lined by townhomes.

All this is part of the city’s larger Transbay redevelopment project, which rezoned the blocks around the old Transbay Terminal as part of an effort to overhaul the area and steer money to construction of the $2.1 billion Transbay Transit Center scheduled to open next year.

If planners determined the tower’s basic form, SCB didn’t use the constraints as an excuse to churn out a shoe box turned on end. Just the opposite. The shaft is sliced and patterned to sharpen the sense of upward motion, such as Solaire’s overscaled stack of three-story-high communal terraces that face the bay. The south and west facades come with slatted sunshades above each row of windows, adding visual texture while helping to shadow the apartments inside — part of a sustainability strategy that earned Solaire a LEED Gold ranking from the United States Green Building Council.

Another discreet touch makes the package something more than product: the skin. The wall panels around the windows are opaque white glass, a bit of shimmer that standard metal panels lack.

None of these elements is lavish. But the focused proportions and depth are a welcome contrast to the confusion uphill.

Solaire is welcoming on the ground as well. The pedestrian alley has a domestic scale, while the base along Folsom Street offers a distinct counterpoint to what’s above, with stone-clad walls that frame tall storefronts and two-story-high window openings. In other words, the lower floors aren’t simply an afterthought to the tower above.

This block also offers a taste of things to come: The city’s larger planning efforts for the area envision Folsom Street as no less than “a grand civic boulevard … the commercial heart of the Transbay and Rincon Hill neighborhoods.” Solaire’s block fits the design parameters of what eventually will extend from Spear Street to Second Street, part of a larger strategy that will include linear parks along several of the north-south streets and the occasional small plaza or park.

As the towers on Rincon Hill have opened, some improvements have materialized. The redone stretch of Main Street alongside Lumina offers a variety of landscaped nooks to rest your feet while checking your smartphone. Even on busy Harrison Street, sidewalks flare out to help pedestrians get safely from one side to the other. Still, it’s hard to imagine the final traffic-clogged blocks of Fremont or First streets ever feeling humane.

The transformation of Rincon Hill might be jarring from the bridge for occasional visitors to the city, but it makes good planning sense. Thousands of residents are being accommodated in a part of town that long was off the map, in towers that are helping create large amounts of affordable housing nearby.

Ultimately, Rincon probably won’t ever feel like a neighborhood unto itself. As the blocks along Folsom fill in, the slope will blend into the emerging Transbay area. And if Solaire is any indication, the next wave of growth might be not only dense but urbane.

Link: Rincon Hill: Inside SF’s First Vertical Neighborhood