Seven Riverway

Luxury Apartments Added to Houston's Uptown

by Tonie Auer

A A rendering shows Houston’s Seven Riverway, which will offer panoramic views of downtown and the Galleria/Uptown skylines. (Image courtesy of the Hanover Company.)

The location of the 21-story luxury apartment building Seven Riverway - off Woodway Drive and adjacent to the exclusive Tanglewood subdivision and Houstonian Club - was selected for its access to work and play as well as its views.

These benefits, however, made construction a little bit harder.

"The Riverway area is lushly landscaped, has water features and is close to Buffalo Bayou and Memorial Park, Houston's largest public park," said John Garibaldi, vice president of development for the eastern U.S. of Houston-based Hanover Co., which is developing and building the project at an undisclosed construction cost as Hanover R.S. Limited Partnership. The building topped out in mid-January with a targeted completion date of December.

Construction challenges included working with offsite offices and little space for staging and access - about two acres.

"Normally we build a job like this out of multiple trailers onsite, but this space is so small that we are working in an office nearby," said Danny Femal, general superintendent for Hanover.

Victor Young, project manager for Hanover, added, "We're in the middle of three other existing high-rise buildings with the closest one about 26 ft. from our property corner to their building."

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"All of the office buildings are in such close proximity that Hanover's tower crane actually swung over one of the buildings, Young said.

"We had to choose a tower crane that could freestand high enough to be above that building," he said. "That building is about the same height as ours, so we had to have the crane 30 to 40 ft. above that. It was about 250 ft. tall."

Additionally, utilities had to be delivered to the development. Electrical, sanitary sewer and water had to go through easements in the established campuses of surrounding buildings, Young said.

Femal said there were many existing utilities in the ground and Hanover had to do a 14-ft. deep excavation under the road and also work around the other utilities.

"Worming your way around the existing stuff is a pretty good trick," he added.

The building is 46 percent glass with a mix of glass and glazing. It is architectural precast with three different precast colors and three different textures for each color, Young said. When complete, the cast-in-place concrete structure will have a total of 22,000 yds. of concrete, he added.

The site offers convenient access to the Galleria, Uptown shopping, restaurants, hotels and commercial office buildings, as well as all main traffic arteries in Houston via immediate access to the IH-610 Loop, he said.

"Seven Riverway will be one of the only luxury apartment residences within the Uptown District and will be an oasis within an urban locale," Garibaldi said.

He said a lot of thought went into the positioning of the project to optimize the panoramic views of both the downtown and Galleria/Uptown-area skylines and in the placement of the pool, aqua lounge and sun deck on the sixth-floor level overlooking a large greenbelt and the downtown Houston skyline.

Seven Riverway will have about 175 luxury rental residences with the average unit size of 1,521 sq. ft. with balconies and terraces. The floor plans feature expansive windows and 10-ft. ceilings with direct access from all garage floors to the building elevator lobby. Residents will also have controlled-access garage parking, trash disposal chutes located on each floor and a loading dock to help with move-in.

"There is currently a great deal of demand for an Uptown residential address in Houston," Garibaldi said. "The Uptown neighborhoods that surround Seven Riverway boast median home sale prices that have quickly climbed to more than $170 per sq. ft., and new high-rise condominiums in the area boast values of more than $1 million."