Legacy Condos: Give Me the Luxuries of Life and I Will Willingly Do Without the Necessities

Um ... ok. This appears to be some sort of an extremely early stage rendering of Legacy Partners' proposed condo tower, Legacy @ Town Lake, on the NE corner of Rainey and Cummings. It is clearly meant to convey an idea of the size and shape of the building. The details will probably change a lot before this is built.

They may also want to re-think the promo material. Conjuring a dead architect isn't going to help you sell condos if the design doesn't look anything like that architect's work. Building with concrete don't make you Frank Lloyd Wright. The Illinois notwithstanding, FLW was better know for low, sprawling designs like Taliesin West than for condo towers with high ceilings.

Similar to the neighboring Shore condos, the parking garage of Legacy @ Town Lake will be fronted by live/work “lofts” with a street level storefront entrance and living space above. This is certainly much better than having a blank wall or the side of a parking garage facing the street. We would prefer real street front retail, but developers are unwilling to build it unless they are forced to do so by the city, as they are downtown. The main problem is parking: developers want to reserve the parking garage for condo residents. If they put in retail/commercial space, the city requires them to provide parking for that space. That means they have to add more floors of parking and keep ‘em separated. This makes the cost of street front retail dramatically more expensive. Instead, they do live/work lofts.

The plus side is that when the area is a little more developed and the demand for retail in the area is more substantial, these live/work lofts should be reasonably easy to convert into small stores or restaurants. It would be great if the city would remove the parking requirements- customers will be nearby residents that don’t need parking, people who come in via mass transit, or people who park in the plethora of surface lots and parking garages that litter downtown (for now). Until then, residents will have to make due with their luxury condos without having a nearby grocery store. That must be what Legacy meant by "The “Frank Lloyd Wright theme" - they were refering to the quotation in the title of this post, not his architectural designs.

* Image from Legacy Partners *