Urbane Planning: CityCentre

CityCentre’s hip new restaurants and lounges, sleek hotel and massive modern fitness complex are a revelation, to be sure. But, for many, the biggest surprise is that it’s—gasp—outside the Loop.

The problem with pressing your nose against the gleaming, floor-to-ceiling picture windows of the eighth-floor suite in the Houston-based Valencia Group’s new boldly contemporary Hotel Sorella (800 W. Sam Houston Pkwy. North, 713.973.1600) is that you have to get out of an insanely comfortable bed decked with fluffy white linens and trek across the ebonized floor to do so.

But it’s so worth it. Because once you get past the velvety chaise lounge and black leather sofas that furnish the airy room, a new vision of Houston spreads out before you. Immediately below, on the edge of the Energy Corridor-adjacent hotel’s grassy plaza, flashy copper-colored fire pits kick cobalt flames into the night, and dozens of just-planted, street-lining trees twinkle with LED lights of periwinkle. Beyond, stretching in the direction of Downtown, manicured lawns and crisply outlined pedestrian-friendly pathways form the spaces between towering new buildings of polished glass and steel and a myriad smaller structures. (The total building space tops 1.8 million square feet.)

Given the eye-popping panorama—a brand new skyline in a city that already boasts at least three others—it’s little wonder the Euro-modern 244-room Sorella, which celebrated its grand opening in November with a fireworks show and rowdy cocktail bash for 2,000, is drawing jet-setting biz travelers, suburban sophisticates and even Inner-Loopers looking for the perfect staycation to CityCentre.

With a bevy of dynamic, unexpectedly stellar new restaurants and lounges, a massive state-of-the-art gym that has health-club connoisseurs schlepping way out of their usual geographic comfort zones, appealing spa and entertainment options, and fashion-forward boutiques set to open in the coming months, the $500 million ultra-urbane development—which offers abundant office, retail and residential space, in a smartly imagined grid near where Interstate 10 meets Beltway 8—seems to have become the sleeper smash of the city’s development biz.

“We knew it was a great piece of real estate,” says Jonathan Brinsden, 40, an exec at Midway Companies, a Houston-based real-estate firm that has designed high-tech medical facilities, vibrant residential communities and upscale malls across the state. Brinsden oversees day-to-day operations at CityCentre. “We were committed to two things—to developing a true pedestrian friendly development, and to bringing something new to Houston.”

Despite impressive first-blush success (a terrific example of the so-called “mixed-use” approach to city planning, which Anita Kramer, a senior director at Washington D.C.’s Urban Land Institute, tells Houston magazine “can have an impact that’s similar to an urban renaissance”) the project has not been without its snags.

One major investor in the centerpiece Sorella—the venture-capital arm of the embattled Stanford Financial Group whose CEO was accused in February by the feds of fraudulent activities separate from any connection with the hotel—had to sell its interest and abandon CityCentre. And the faltering national economy got the better of a key tenant, as Bailey Banks & Biddle, the high-end jeweler formerly owned by Zale Corp, filed for bankruptcy in November and left a hole in the retail lineup. But the blue-eyed Brinsden, a graduate of Kingwood High School who also attended Texas A&M, is working hard, taking meetings all over the country, in effort to fill retail spaces.

Meanwhile, plenty of things are going quite well at CityCentre, which occupies a 37-acre plot that in the 1980s was the Town and Country Mall. (The new, improved Town and Country is within walking distance).

Walled off from the highways by perimeter high-rises, the development has a far-from-the-freeway feel that emphasizes hard work, serious fun and, for residents, authentic city living. Bistros and bars commingle with several different types of homes amid mod, verdant green spaces designed by the Houston firm of James Burnett, which is also responsible for celebrated public parks in Chicago and other cities. There are 35 residential brownstones, 250 lofts and the 370-unit Domain apartment building, all of which are currently open for sales and leasing.