May 12, 2014

Lincoln Square to begin construction in July

Images courtesy Kemper Development Co. and Neoscape [enlarge]

Kemper Development Co.’s expansion of Lincoln Square will have a 31-story office tower (shown above) and a 41-story hotel and apartment building.

Utility work is already underway, and Kemper Development Co. said it plans to break ground on the expansion of Lincoln Square July 18.

When complete in 2016, the second phase of Lincoln Square will have a 31-story, 700,000-square-foot office tower and a 41-story tower with a 250-room hotel and 250 apartments.

An expansion of Bellevue Square will likely begin about a year after Lincoln Square. Plans call for two 17-story towers on a three-story retail podium with five levels of underground parking at the southeast corner of the mall. There will be 240 apartments in the two towers and a 200-room hotel in the south tower.

Together, the two expansions will add about 2 million square feet to Kemper Development's Bellevue Collection at a cost of $1.2 billion.

Kemper Development will open a high-tech leasing and sales office at Lincoln Square called The Studio in June. The Studio has 3-D models of the expansions of Lincoln Square and Bellevue Square.

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Kemper’s $1.2 billion expansion of the Bellevue Collection will add 2 million square feet of office, retail, hotel and apartments.

When a prospective office, hotel or apartment tenant comes in, staff can select a floor in any of the new buildings and show what the view looks like on a video screen.

Several other interactive screens show renderings, videos and other aspects of the expanded Bellevue Collection.

“We've learned over the years of building real estate and showing it and selling it that nine out of 10 people have a hard time visualizing something they can't see,” Kemper Freeman Jr. said at an event to promote The Studio last week.

Kemper Development is planning another way for prospective to tenants to visualize the projects. Later this summer, Kemper Development will open a space called Black Box, which shows model interiors of apartments, hotel rooms and office space.

Kemper Development tapped The Voyager Group, a Tustin, California-based branding and design company to design and program The Studio.

Sclater Partners Architects is designing both expansions, and GLY Construction is the general contractor.

Kemper Development wants to lease out all the space in the new buildings before construction is complete.