From high-profile design commissions to exciting listings, there is always something new happening in the world of real estate. In this roundup, AD PRO has everything you need to know.
On the market
Debbie Reynolds’s former L.A. home lists
Five years after Debbie Reynolds’s death, the showbiz icon’s former Los Angeles home is back on the market for $2.1 million.
The three-bedroom mini estate in Valley Village was originally built in 1929 as a traditional English country garden home with oak floors, wood-beam ceilings, and French doors opening to private gardens and patios. A large private backyard offers a brick patio, bocce court, and saltwater pool, nestled in beds of white roses and lavender and a lemon tree orchard.
“The home has the unique pedigree of original architecture, Hollywood history, and an aesthetic that is very beautiful,” Greg Holcomb, listing realtor with Douglas Elliman, Pasadena, told the New York Post. The primary bedroom suite even has an elevated “turret” where Reynolds reportedly kept her piano and entertained friends.
The Singin’ in the Rain star bought the home for $220,000 in 1987, but had been living with daughter Carrie Fisher in Coldwater Canyon for many years at the time of their deaths. (Fisher died one day before her mother.)
After Reynolds’s passing, Orange Is the New Black actress Amanda Fuller purchased the home for $1.84 million and commissioned an extensive renovation, the Post reported.
Solaire in Battery Park City launches sales
Sales launch this week at the Solaire, a one-time rental building in New York’s Battery Park City and the first residential high-rise granted LEED certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. (It’s since earned LEED Platinum status.) Now, residences are available to own in the tower.
Designed in 2002 by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, the Solaire has a sustainable blueprint that begins with its façade, composed of photovoltaic cells that generate energy and lower residents’ electricity bills. (Overall, the building uses a third of the energy of comparable properties, according to a release.)
A fifth of the structure is made from recycled construction materials, while more than 60% was sourced or manufactured within a 500-mile radius. The on-site water treatment center allows the Solaire to consume half the water of a similarly sized tower, while rainwater irrigates the shared roof garden, cooling the building in summer and keeping it warm in winter.
Buyers have the option of newly re-imagined interiors by Cookfox Architects, with oversized casement windows and white oak flooring. Model units designed by Rebecca Robertson Interiors come with Miele washer and dryers, white lacquer kitchen cabinetry, and Adamantium quartzite countertops and backsplashes. Apartments at the 27-story building range from studios to three-bedroom units, with pricing starting at $700,000.
Milestones
Artefacto partners with Miami’s Kobi Karp on Casa Hibiscus
Architect Kobi Karp, builder Todd Michael Glaser, and design brand Artefacto have inaugurated their new partnership with Casa Hibiscus by Artefacto, an 8,000-square-foot spec home on Miami Beach’s Hibiscus Island.
Offering an ultramodern design with unique Brazilian flair, the eight-bedroom, 9.5-bathroom property includes a spacious two-story main house along with a guest house that doubles as a three-car garage. When completed next year, the property will include more than 90 feet of ocean frontage and an oversized dock with boat slips.
Artefacto owner Paulo Bacchi bought the lot in 2018 for $5.6 million and approached Karp and Glaser about collaborating on a branded standalone home—“a spectacular and singular lifestyle concept in Miami Beach,” Bacchi tells AD.
First announced in August, Casa Hibiscus is listed for $24 million with Nelson Gonzalez of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices EWM Realty.
Bacchi is also expanding Artefacto’s footprint in Miami. Founded in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1976, the company will be opening its new U.S. flagship store in Coral Gables on October 22.
Olson Kundig launches in New York with The Cortland
Related is offering a first look inside The Cortland, its new residential tower at 555 West 22nd Street in West Chelsea.
The architecture by Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) mixes limestone, metal, and more than a million handmade bricks to give a “distinctly historical feel” to the 25-story building, which will include 144 residences, ranging from studios to five-bedroom apartments and penthouses.
For its first residential development in New York, Seattle-based Olson Kundig has designed interiors that “play on the creative and bohemian nature of West Chelsea’s art scene” paired with a refined West Coast aesthetic, according to principal Tom Kundig. “The building’s exterior relates to the neighborhood’s historic architectural language, while the interiors provide a complementary, updated feel,” he says.
Sales are expected to launch later this winter with construction wrapping in early 2022.
Vancouver goes green with a mass timber office tower
Hudson Pacific Properties hopes to transform Vancouver’s Bentall Centre with Burrard Exchange, a proposed 16-story mass timber office and retail development designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox.
Based on recently submitted plans, the 260-foot-tall complex would be one of the tallest office buildings in North America made out of engineered wood. The building “addresses issues of city-center planning with sustainability on multiple fronts,” KPF design principal Marianne Kwok tells AD. Wood has a relatively low carbon footprint, and it is the only material that can remove carbon from the atmosphere over the lifetime of its usage. And the strength-to-weight ratio of engineered timber exceeds reinforced concrete and structural steel while reducing noise and air pollution during construction.
Building operations at Burrard Exchange will be 100% carbon neutral, with other eco-friendly features including on-site lockers for more than 700 bicycles, as well as a direct connection to Burrard Skytrain Station.
“KPF is incredibly proud that our first large-scale, hybrid mass timber project is located in Vancouver, British Columbia,” Kwok says, “a city and province seen as a world leader in sustainable forest management.”
In the news
New development activity more than doubles from 2019
Manhattan real estate hasn’t just recovered from the pandemic slump, it’s doing better than in the pre-COVID era, according to a new report from Brown Harris Stevens Development Marketing. The report indicates that contracts at new developments have more than doubled in the third quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 2019 (451 vs. 214 units).
Somewhat less surprising: This quarter’s figures are nearly triple last year’s, when 173 deals were inked. Contracts signed between $1 and $3 million increased 125% from Q3 2020 to Q3 2021 (103 deals to 232). In 2019, 122 contracts were signed at the same price point.
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According to the agency, the Upper East Side saw the most substantial boom, with 63 deals inked in new developments in Q3 2021, compared to 21 in 2020 and just five in 2019. Another neighborhood on the upswing is the Chelsea-Flatiron District area (between West 14th and West 34th Streets), where 28 deals closed in Q3 2021, up from nine in 2020 and just two in 2019. “These areas saw major upticks in activity due in large part to projects nearing completion and offering buyers move-in-ready product,” said Brown Harris Stevens Development Marketing president Stephen Kliegerman.
Overall, units between $1–3 million accounted for a little more than half of all new development contracts this quarter. Kliegerman said that was driven, in part, by a return of foreign investors and “parents buying for—or with—their adult, college, and graduate-age children.”
Almost 20% of units that closed were priced at $5 million or above, with just 5% at $10 million or above. Only eight units closed at $15 million or above, with another eight in contract and 59 being actively marketed.
Apartment conversions are at an all-time high
It’s also been a banner year for converting commercial buildings into residential spaces, according to Rent Cafe, with 20,100 new apartments converted from other uses in 151 buildings nationwide.
Repurposing offices, hotels, department stores, schools, and even hospitals into apartments is cheaper, faster, and greener than starting from scratch. And residents are often tempted by an older building’s history, character, and architectural details. The trend has grown steadily since 2010, when just 5,270 conversions were reported. Over the last 18 months, redevelopment has been boosted by the work-from-home trend and hotel closures.
Former offices comprise a quarter of future repurposing projects, according to data from Yardi Matrix, with over 52,700 units in different stages of development for 2022 and beyond.
