Parts of Rice Village to see renovations
This holiday season, shoppers could have an easier time parking and navigating their way around Rice Village.
Landscaping and parking improvements, including technology that allows guests to use mobile devices to find available spots, are part of a multimilliondollar renovation underway on a 296,000-squarefoot commercial property in Rice Village, located west of Rice University.
The projects are part of the first phase of a multiyear renovation that will include improvements to sidewalks, creation of common areas with outdoor seating, installation of public art and construction of new building facades.
The project was announced Oct. 6 by Trademark Property Co., which manages five buildings in Rice Village on behalf of owner Rice Management Co., the entity responsible for the Rice University endowment. The first phase of the renovation project started Oct. 8. The management company expects some work on the initial phase of the renovation to be completed before the holiday shopping season starts.
“There is going to be minimal disruption to retailers and restaurants,” said Tommy Miller, managing director and chief investment officer of Trademark Property. “We are working really hard, and we have to work around tenant leases and schedules to get work done before the holidays so that shoppers can see an improvement in the way they navigate and walk around the property with new landscaping and a little bit of new parking and most of the parking garage improvements.”
Miller said the city of Houston has already signed off on the addition of some off-street parking spaces, too. During the first phase of the renovation, Trademark has been updating landscaping, creating common spaces for guests and installing public art. The property management company is commissioning art to be placed throughout its Rice Village building complexes.
“We want to build on our proximity to the museum district,” Miller said. “The people live in the Rice neighborhood because it is near culture, the museums. Rice University is an important institution from a public art standpoint, too.”
Of the five buildings Trademark Property manages in Rice Village, four are retail, and one is an office building. Only the retail buildings, including two parking garages, will be part of the overall renovation.
During the initial project phase, the two garages, including a multilevel parking garage, are to be painted and parking spaces are to be restriped. Also, a new electronic parking management system will be installed.
“It is all activated by mobile phone and ties in our parking validation program,” Miller said. “We are pulling out the old-school parking booth with gate arms and person manning the booth.
“We are going high-tech with a completely new system that will tell users where available parking spaces are in the garage, how many are available, and if they have their parking validated by a retailer, they can use that to figure out how much money they owe.”
The second parking garage, Miller said, is a one-level building with a rooftop parking deck at the corner of Kirby Drive and University Boulevard that is underutilized.
Trademark Property will tie the garage into the electronic parking management system to help direct guests to it.
“Right now, there is hardly any signage, or what we call wayfinding, making it very difficult for shoppers to find out where to park, where spaces are and, in some cases, they don’t even know there are two parking garages,” Miller said.
After the holiday season, the bulk of the construction work will move into remodeling facades.
The work will be done in multiple phases and eventually will impact all four of the retail buildings managed by Trademark Property in the shopping district.
“The façade changes are going to give tenants the opportunity to express their brands more prominently,” Miller said. “Right now, if you look at the buildings that we own, they are all red brick, the letters on the signs are all the same, they have the same black awnings. Retailers today want their own identity.”
Rice Village dates back to the late 1930s and features a mix of stores and restaurants. There are numerous landowners throughout the shopping district. Trademark Property does not manage all of the buildings in the shopping and dining district. The renovation project is designed to bring Trademark’s commercial portfolio only in line with the area’s diverse architectural neighborhood, Miller said.
“Rice Village is an eclectic, funky, 20-block urban district with a lot of character,” he said. “All the buildings look different. If you look at the buildings that we own and are working on, even though it is the largest portfolio of retail in Rice Village, they represent the antithesis of what people think of the village as, which is very different architecture from store to store.”
According to Miller, some of the buildings to be impacted by the renovation were built in the 1980s and ’90s. A building formerly known as Village Arcade, located at the corner of Morningside Drive and University Boulevard, is the newest building on the property, and was completed sometime in the 1990s.
Miller isn’t sure how old another building at the corner of Amherst Street and Kelvin Drive is but said it may date to the 1940s or ’50s. It was renovated by the prior owner at some point in the mid-1980s to early-1990s, he said. There are some additional smaller buildings owned by Rice Management Co. in the urban district, as well.
Nash D’Amico and his daughter, Brina D’Amico, own D’Amico’s Italian Market Café at 5510 Morningside Drive in Rice Village.
Their business is among the retail façades to receive an update during the renovation project. The D’Amico’s already have an architect developing branding concepts for their restaurant’s storefront. The restaurant has been serving Italian food in Rice Village for 19 years.
“We came up with two or three different façades,” Nash D’Amico said.
“They are not etched in stone but are some ideas to use as inspiration toward whatever we wind up doing. We would like to change the façade.”
The restaurant building has one of the longest sides in the district, potentially providing what its co-owner called “a blank canvas” to create an identity. When the current building the restaurant is in was built in the 1990s, he said it was beautiful.
However, Nash D’Amico said it didn’t match the uniqueness of the area’s the other eclectic stores that make up Rice Village.
“There are a lot of business owners here, and I think they want to have storefronts that allow for more of an individual identity,” he said.