Legacy West’s 29 Story Tower Will Bring a Taste of Uptown to Plano
04/26/17
An apartment tower that starts construction this week in Plano won’t just be the tallest building in the $3 billion Legacy West development.
The luxury LVL29 high-rise will also be one of the tallest buildings outside of central Dallas.
At 29 stories, the $100 million high-rise is going to be one of the most distinctive towers built in North Texas.
With an elliptical shape and a curved roofline, the building is anything but boxy.
“Our main goal was to have a building that didn’t look like everybody else’s,” said Luke Harry, project manager with NE Development. “It’s striking and will stand out.
“That location deserves something different.”
Smacked down between new corporate campuses for Liberty Mutual Insurance and JPMorgan Chase, the LVL29 tower is in the middle of the fastest growing employment center in Texas.
Almost 20,000 new workers will be located in the immediate area near the intersection of the Dallas North Tollway and State Highway 121 by the end of next year.
The apartment high-rise site is in walking distance to dozens of new shops, restaurants and a luxury hotel in the nearby Legacy West Urban Village.
Harry said the average income of people working in the surrounding Legacy development is close to $100,000 a year.
“It’s shocking how much money there is within a stone’s throw of the building,” Harry said. “All the jobs coming and the development down there are amazing.”
The Legacy West tower will be priced about the same as the almost one dozen apartment high-rises on the way in Dallas.
The cheapest apartment in the tower will be a 660-square-foot unit priced at around $1,600 a month.
Penthouses on the top two floors will be as big as 3,800 square feet and will rent for thousands more.
“We want something that a CEO would want to rent,” Harry said. “We looked at Uptown and what other people are building to make sure we hit the market.”
Along with the tower units, the project will have a row of townhomes wrapping the lower floors.
On the seventh level, a deck over the parking garage will include swimming pool, outdoor gardens and gathering spaces for tenants.
“We will have five apartments right on that amenity level facing the pool,” Harry said.
NE Development anticipates the tower will take 24 months to build.
Dallas-based architect Humphreys & Partners and Henderson Design Studio designed the tower. Hunt Construction is the general contractor.
“It’s an extremely important milestone not only for Legacy West but also all of Collin County,” said Fehmi Karahan, one of the developers of the 250-acre Legacy West project. “Who would have thought we would see a 29-story building here 20 years ago when I first arrived in Plano.
“Back then this was all just open fields.”
The LVL29 tower is actually one of two high-rise rental buildings going up in West Plano.
Dallas developer High Street Residential — a unit of the Trammell Crow Co. — is building a 25-story apartment tower on the east side of the Dallas North Tollway near Legacy Drive. The 300-unit apartment project will open in late 2018.
LVL29 tower builder NE Development is working on multiple apartment projects in three states.
The company is building a 280-unit rental community in the Denton County town of Little Elm.
And the developer has projects on the way in San Antonio, the Austin area and in Durango and Pueblo, Col.
In downtown Oklahoma City, NE Development is turning a vacant historic office tower into a combination of hotel rooms and apartments.
Harry said that he’s glad the company’s high-rise isn’t’ in the competitive Uptown Dallas market where multiple apartment towers will open this year.
“We are glad to be 22 miles north of there in Legacy West.”
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