Multi-Housing News - July 2009 - (Page 18)

case study A Hit in Music City Icon in the Gulch helps anchor Nashville’s hottest new neighborhood By Jeffrey Steele, Contributing Editor I n the 1990s, the Nashville district known as The Gulch was striking a sour note with Music City residents. A neglected, low-lying area surrounding CSX rail yards, The Gulch was dotted with ancient industrial buildings and warehouses, many of which were abandoned. It was also home to a large indigent population and a few seedy adult bookstores. But The Gulch was not without its upside, recalls Hunter Gee, project manager for Looney Ricks Kiss, a Memphis-based architectural and planning firm renowned for creating master planned communities. The area was nestled into a land-locked declivity next to Music Row, the nexus of Nashville’s music scene and a huge tourist draw. It also stood adjacent to both the heavily traversed I-40 highway corridor and a rail line ideally suited for future rapid transit initiatives. In short, The Gulch appeared the kind of diamond in the rough that just might be polished into a gem of a live-work-play community. In the intervening years, The Gulch has emerged as one of Nashville’s newest, most exciting neighborhoods, offering housing to fit a number of price points, tempting restaurants and glittering stores, as well as office buildings that house tenants from tech companies to entertainment enterprises. “It’s now the hottest place to be in Nashville, and it’s going to continue to be,” says Gee, whose firm worked with Memphis-based Marketstreet Equities and other developers to help carve out this new urban oasis. The eye-catching centerpiece of The Gulch is Icon in the Gulch, a mixed-use structure of 418 condominiums and about 30,000 square feet of ground floor retail. Icon in the Gulch is comprised of a tower with 14 floors of condominiums above eight floors of parking, and an eight-story mid-rise structure housing additional condos wrapping around the garage. The building was designed in late 2005, broke ground in April 2006 and was essentially complete early this year. To date, all but 43 condos have sold. The most distinctive features of Icon in the Gulch are amenity-packed recreation settings on its fourth and ninth floors, say CEO Charles Carlisle and chief development officer Glen Bartosh, of Bristol Development Group, the developer of the project. Both levels are expressly designed to appeal to a target demo- 18 July 2009 | Multi-Housing News | Official Publication of Multi-Housing World

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Multi-Housing News - July 2009

Multi-Housing News - July 2009
Contents
From the Editor
Executive Insight
Market Pulse
Profile
Market Report
Management
Case Study: Luxury
Finance
Kitchen & Bath
Products & Services
Tech Trends

Multi-Housing News - July 2009