After more than a year of construction, several buildings at the mixed-use River House development on Nicholson Drive are nearing completion.
The 34,000-square-foot, three-story office building and the clubhouse-leasing office will both be completed in January and ready for tenant occupancy.
Developer Marc Blumberg says the project’s leasing agent, Ty Gose of NAI/Latter & Blum, has received a lot of interest from prospective tenants and that several lease proposals are currently outstanding, though no deals have yet been announced.
The River House’s two, four-story apartment buildings, which will contain a combined 224 residential units, should be completed in early spring, Blumberg says. Pre-leasing is now available, and the development’s leasing office will open on site Feb. 1.
Meanwhile, construction will begin in early January on the 15,000-square-foot retail center, which is scheduled to be completed in late spring. Like the office building, several potential tenant deals are in the works but nothing has yet been finalized.
The River House, which is located on the site of the old Prince Murat Hotel, has been a long time in the making. It was originally approved by the Planning Commission in 2009, but was delayed because of the recession and, later, a change in the financing plan for the project. Construction began in the fall of 2015.
In the years since Blumberg and his partner in the venture, Manny Organek, began planning for The River House, the Nicholson Drive corridor has seen an increase in development and activity. Three buildings on the nearby Water Campus have been completed or are nearing completion, and plans for a fourth are underway.
A shared creative and retail space, 1010 Nic has opened in the area, and LSU has broken ground just two miles away on Nicholson Gateway, its huge mixed-use development near the south gates of the campus. Plans also continue moving forward for the development of a streetcar line along Nicholson Drive that would connect LSU to downtown.
“On his last site visit, Manny noted the large pickup in activity along Nicholson due to the opening of the adjacent Water Campus and the new shops at 1010 Nic,” Blumberg says. “At this point, the more the merrier.”
—Stephanie Riegel
