San Francisco rising:
Stylish towers’ residents get prewrapped set of amenities, distance from city’s clamor
The new housing towers of San Francisco are all about a lifestyle where the architecture may be tightly confined, but the interior offers visions of a lifestyle of hedonistic convenience. If you can afford it, of course.
Above: The new Azure Apartments look down on Mission Bay. The residential high-rise lures tenants with its appealing extras.
Kristie Locks is making the case for life in Rincon Hill’s newest apartment tower, where rents for a 619-square-foot, one-bedroom unit start at $4,065, and the bells and whistles are state of the art.
There’s a refrigerated room off the lobby to store deliveries of fresh groceries. Two “board rooms” can be reserved with seating for eight. A concierge is on duty 24 hours a day. An app lets you pay the rent, tell the valet to retrieve your car, or schedule a dog-walker or an in-room massage.
“This is the new way of living,” said Locks, senior leasing agent for the Jasper, which stacks 320 apartments in a 40-story shaft behind the gas station at the entrance to the Bay Bridge. “People love how techie our units are. It’s San Francisco!”
The Jasper is one extreme of what I call Extreme Living: the packaged lifestyles being dangled before potential residents of all those buildings taking shape above the streets of the city’s northeast corner. We long-timers may resent blocked views, or be dumbfounded by the prices. But the past decade has proved that people who want to live in San Francisco and can afford it — an important distinction — aren’t just looking for Victorian charm and bohemian funk. For many of them, modern amenities are as seductive as that little cafe around the corner.
To get a sense of this brave cool world, the one inside many of the buildings I review, I recently visited the marketing centers of three mint-fresh complexes: the Jasper, Lumina
and Azure. The first two are among the crop that has sprung up on Rincon Hill since its height limits were raised in 2005 to allow high-rise housing within walking distance of the Financial District. Azure is the latest installment of Mission Bay, a former rail yard that went through decades of planning but took off only after the Giants opened their ballpark in 2000.
Azure is the smallest of the three, 273 apartments filling a 16-story tower along Mission Creek, and it’s the one with the shortest list of gilded lures (and the one-bedrooms are priced from $3,600 — a steal!). Concierge service ends at midnight. There’s no screening room for movies or sporting events, not even a sauna. But there is a dog-washing cubby in the parking garage, plus six bicycle storage rooms, and each unit has a washer and dryer. The five-story base enfolds an expansive outdoor common area, where Azure’s lounge with its demonstration kitchen spills into an artful terrain that includes three sculptural fountains and a 30-footlong grilling station: “This is probably what our residents use the most,” said Alex La Flam, whose title is community manager.
The underground parking entrance at Azure Apartments in San Francisco, Calif. on Saturday, Aug. 22, 2015.
La Flam and Corey Warren, a vice president of property management for Azure developer Equity Residential, emphasize the sedate tone of Mission Bay compared to more established — but sometimes troublesome — San Francisco neighborhoods. “Mission Bay feels like a suburb in the city,” suggested Warren. “It’s newer, clean, more quiet.”
Rincon Hill doesn’t have Mission Bay’s parks, or its houseboats in the creek. Locks instead emphasized proximity: to the Embarcadero on foot, to Silicon Valley-bound freeways in a car: “You’re out of the hustle and bustle, but you can be in it in two seconds.” And views: The interactive features in Locks’ office