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Harwood, Westbank Break Ground on $100M-Plus Azure
By Connie Gore
Last updated: April 5, 2005 09:21am

DALLAS-Harwood International and Westbank Project Corp. officially are under construction with a $100-million-plus residential tower that's pushing the 65% sales mark. The call to start was sounded this morning at a gold-shovel groundbreaking before Dallas' real estate leaders and elected officials.
The 202-unit Azure, a 31-story tower in Uptown, is the second US project for the Vancouver, BC-based residential high-rise expert. "Harwood had the site and the desire to do extremely high quality," Ian Gillespie, Westbank's owner, tells GlobeSt.com. "It was a little bit of a stretch of us to go to Dallas, but we really liked the idea of teaming with Harwood. There are not many developers who want to do extremely high-quality high rises and what we can't do is compromise ourselves for one project." The Azure will sit at 2900 McKinnon St. on a 1.3-acre carve-out from Harwood's 12-block footprint in Uptown.

Now that Westbank's arrived, Gillespie says Harwood will be its only teammate in Dallas/Fort Worth. And, he adds, there's a good chance that additional projects will come out of Harwood's Uptown ground. But for now, the focus is on the Azure, which he predicts will be "largely sold out" by the time it delivers in spring 2007.

"It's selling a little better than we anticipated," Gillespie says. "One penthouse is sold and a contract's pending on the other. He says condo sales are "zeroing in on 65%," predominately to Dallas-area residents. Prices range from $400,000 to $4.2 million for a unit mix with 881 sf to 5,025 sf of upscale space.

Gillespie says Dallas is in its formative stages in comparison to his homeport, where developers have cranes on the ground for 20 residential high-rise projects. But in five years, Dallas will have arrived both in significantly higher prices and demand, he predicts. "It will slowly ramp up as people adopt this lifestyle," says Gillespie, whose other US project is located in Seattle.

In a previous interview, Gabriel Barbier-Mueller, Harwood's founder and CEO, said he has been waiting for two decades for Dallas to reach a stage for high-rise residential development. For that story, click here.

With the timing now right, Barbier-Mueller last year formed Harwood Living, a 12-member team formed to steer the development of the flagship property for a branded-residential portfolio. Centex won the general contractor's contract for the Azure, designed by James KM Cheng Architects Inc., with offices in Vancouver and New York City, and Gensler Architects, a San Francisco-headquartered international firm with offices in 25 cities. The rest of the team has Dallas-based SWA Group as landscape architect; Gensler and Lauren Rottet of Los Angeles teaming on interior designs; and sales by Gullotto Group/Ebby Halliday Realtors and the Seattle-based Rennie Marketing Systems.