Dallas - Azure [Archive] - SkyscraperCity

CTroyMathis

April 30th, 2005, 11:37 PM

Since the site has officially broken ground, might as well revive the thread.
Hopefully some u/c progress photos will start rolling in during the next few months.

Again, here is the official website: http://www.azureliving.com
^Maybe they'll slap a webcam up online sometime in the next few months. Who knows.

http://forum.dallasmetropolis.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=5859

Attached article just discusses official groundbreaking:

Harwood, Westbank Break Ground on $100M-Plus Azure
By Connie Gore | Globe St.
Last updated: April 5, 2005 09:21am

DALLAS-Harwood International and Westbank Project Corp. officially
are under construction with a $100-million-plus residential tower
that's pushing the 65% sales mark. The call to start was sounded
this morning at a gold-shovel groundbreaking before Dallas' real
estate leaders and elected officials.
The 202-unit Azure, a 31-story tower in Uptown, is the second US
project for the Vancouver, BC-based residential high-rise expert.
"Harwood had the site and the desire to do extremely high quality,"
Ian Gillespie, Westbank's owner, tells GlobeSt.com. "It was a little
bit of a stretch of us to go to Dallas, but we really liked the idea of
teaming with Harwood. There are not many developers who want to
do extremely high-quality high rises and what we can't do is
compromise ourselves for one project." The Azure will sit at 2900
McKinnon St. on a 1.3-acre carve-out from Harwood's 12-block
footprint in Uptown.

Now that Westbank's arrived, Gillespie says Harwood will be its only
teammate in Dallas/Fort Worth. And, he adds, there's a good chance
that additional projects will come out of Harwood's Uptown ground.
But for now, the focus is on the Azure, which he predicts will be
"largely sold out" by the time it delivers in spring 2007.

"It's selling a little better than we anticipated," Gillespie says. "One
penthouse is sold and a contract's pending on the other. He says
condo sales are "zeroing in on 65%," predominately to Dallas-area
residents. Prices range from $400,000 to $4.2 million for a unit mix
with 881 sf to 5,025 sf of upscale space.

Gillespie says Dallas is in its formative stages in comparison to his
homeport, where developers have cranes on the ground for 20
residential high-rise projects. But in five years, Dallas will have
arrived both in significantly higher prices and demand, he predicts.
"It will slowly ramp up as people adopt this lifestyle," says Gillespie,
whose other US project is located in Seattle.

In a previous interview, Gabriel Barbier-Mueller, Harwood's founder
and CEO, said he has been waiting for two decades for Dallas to
reach a stage for high-rise residential development. For that story,
click here.

With the timing now right, Barbier-Mueller last year formed Harwood
Living, a 12-member team formed to steer the development of the
flagship property for a branded-residential portfolio. Centex won the
general contractor's contract for the Azure, designed by James KM
Cheng Architects Inc., with offices in Vancouver and New York City,
and Gensler Architects, a San Francisco-headquartered international
firm with offices in 25 cities. The rest of the team has Dallas-based
SWA Group as landscape architect; Gensler and Lauren Rottet of Los
Angeles teaming on interior designs; and sales by Gullotto
Group/Ebby Halliday Realtors and the Seattle-based Rennie
Marketing Systems.