Tuesday, March 4, 2008 by Chas Sisk
The Tennessean
Midrise to rise in Hillsboro Village
Offices, garage near Sunset Grill to help relieve area's retail and parking crunch.

Hillsboro Village's crowded retail district may soon get some more space under a plan to build a five-story office building.

A group of local investors will build a midrise on the corner of 20th Avenue South and Belcourt Avenue, currently the site of a parking lot near Sunset Grill restaurant. The building will feature street level stores and four levels of office space wrapped around a public garage.

The project, named 20th and Belcourt in the Village, calls for creating an office building on par with upscale towers on Music Row and West End Avenue, said Randy Rayburn, a local partner in the project.

The building is also meant to help solve a persistent parking crunch in Hillsboro Village, the commercial district with an eclectic bunch of retail shops, nightspots and restaurants. The area sits just south of Vanderbilt University.

"The supply of people and customers that populate the village has grown exponentially over the years, but the supply of parking has remained static," said Rayburn, who owns the Sunset Grill and Cabana restaurants across the street from the building site.

"This will add parking. If it didn't do that, we wouldn't have done it."

Rayburn will team up with real estate investors John Nelley and Al Buckley to develop the project, which will be the first major commercial building since tougher design rules were implemented for the area in 1999.

The project meets those guidelines, a spokesman for the Metro Planning Department said, clearing the way for construction to begin this summer.

Building to be 70 feet tall

At about 70 feet, the building will be one of the tallest in Hillsboro Village. It will replace a 70-car parking lot with a 312-car garage wrapped with 12,000 square feet of ground-floor shops and 55,000 square feet of upscale offices. Brentwood-based ProVenture Commercial Real Estate will handle leasing.

Brokers will aim their recruitment efforts at small, local retailers, with stores ranging from 1,200 square feet to 2,500 square feet. Office space will be designed for tenants such as orthodontic practices, music companies and medium-sized law firms that need 4,000 to 20,000 square feet of space.

With vacancy rates in the Music Row and West End areas below 10 percent, brokers should be able to find tenants for the building, said Rob Lowe, a principal with Colliers Turley Martin Tucker.

"If the price is right, I think there's certainly demand for that corridor," he said.

Green building proposed

Plans are still being finalized, but the developers hope to construct a building that will receive silver certification under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

Local architect Manuel Zeitlin has been hired to serve as the project's architect.

Neighbors not opposed

Neighbors generally accept the project because it will add much-needed parking and replace the current lot with something that's more attractive, said Burkley Allen, president of the Hillsboro-West End Neighborhood Association.

"I don't think everybody is jumping for joy...but the (neighborhood association) board was generally receptive to the proposal," she said.

Kim Hawkins has been picked to work as the project's landscape architect. T.W. Frierson Contract Inc., will serve as general contractor.