riceconstructioncompany

For more information on the Leopard Sky installation not shown, visit www.sheilaklein.com or www.blumenthalsheetmetal.com - we were happy to have a local metal fabricator build and install this portion of the project.

The lower rendering is The Richey Street Brownstones at Sterrett Street. You can see floor plans at www.sterrettstreet.com. These will be built in late 2006 pending pre-sales of 3 of 7 units. Price per SF will be around $165. This isn't downtown, and it isn't priced like downtown either. Did we do okay with the design?

The building that was demolished for the Sterrett Street project was 802 Walnut - on the corner of Sterrett Street and Walnut Street. The building was 4 stories tall with a dry Houston basement, constructed in 1912 as the Patrick Moving and Storage building. This entire development is owned by Bill Lipscomb, a member of GHPA and prior recipient of their Good Brick Award. Bill was instrumental in saving the 1200 Rothwell and 1204/1206 Nance buildings from demolition. The building that was taken down had been for sale for over a decade. There had been several re-development attempts using the building, but all failed. The building was only 20k SF. The first floor has 13' ceilings, but the ceiling height dropped to less than 8' by the time you reach the top floor with view, and the windows on that floor were centered in the wall space - when standing you had to bend over to see out of the windows. Still, we loved the building and tried hard to find a redevelopment plan we could get financing for. We couldn't. The building was poorly built, rebar supporting the floors was within 1" of the bottom of the concrete floors, and instead of adding support to the concrete they were ating as a basket trying to hold the weight of the concrete. The roof and floors were sagging in excess of 6" between 13' column centers. The cost to fix the structural issues of the building far exceeded the potential marketability of s small building with low ceilings. Once our engineers declared the building a danger, we felt it needed to come down. After the fact, I think our engineers where wrong - it took forever to take the building down, it didn't give up easily. We're disappointed too, to lose the building, but it was a hard decision to make. We're trying to make the construction in the block interesting and something worthy of area. We hope you will visit Sterrett Street - as of 8/15/05 1209 Sterrett is open Sat/Sun 1-5pm.

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