Allen House site to be redeveloped

Looks like more changes are in store for Allen Parkway: According to the Chronicle, the Allen House apartments will soon be demolished to make way for Regent Square, a mixed-use "urban village" development. Construction on the first phase of the project, at Allen Parkway and Dunlavy, is expected to begin in September, with completion scheduled for 2010.

The initial phase of Regent Square will include 740 apartment units, 230,000 square feet of retail space, 60,000 square feet of office space and a hotel. A proposed second phase would include 1,000 more residential units, including three condo towers, and an additional 100,000 square feet of retail. Regent Square is one of several dense mixed-use projects being planned for Houston — among the others is Ed Wulfe's BLVD Place at the corner of Post Oak and San Felipe and CityCentre on the site of Town & Country Mall — but it's unique in that it will be on a relatively small site and is supposedly being designed to blend with the surrounding neighborhood (which, these days, consists mostly of upscale apartments and townhomes). The developer, GID Urban Development Group, has hired seven architects to work on the design: David M. Schwarz/Architectural Services of Washington did the master plan, Houston's Morris Architects is the executive architect, and collaborators include high-profile firms like Robert A.M. Stern Architects (which designed the Hobby Center here), Aponwao Design of Miami and B&D Studio of Parma, Italy. Schwarz was responsible for the design of West Village in Dallas; if you've visited there, you'll have an idea of the kind of project Regent Square might be.

The redevelopment means residents of Allen House, which was built in the 1960s and has a reputation as a close-knit apartment community, will have to find somewhere else to live — we expect prices in Regent Square will be quite a bit higher than they are at Allen House. Residents in the portion of the complex that will be demolished first were notified yesterday that they'll have to move in June, the Chronicle reported.