Monday, December 28th, 2009
In 2008 I made 10 trips to Dubai and worked on two projects. In doing so, I met many wonderful people and saw a good deal of projects that were beyond belief. A good deal of these projects were completed and many more will never be built. In general, I found the Emiratis to be gracious host and the hired help to be less than forth coming. Outlined below are my observations.
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Tags: development, Dubai, Dubailand, UAE, Wafi
Posted in Culture, Real Estate, Real Estate Development, Retail, Shopping Centers | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
Over the past 6 weeks we have seen our daily readership of our blogs and traffic to our web site almost double. Visitors vary widely and range from Brazil to Southeast Asia and from the Middle East and India to Europe and North America. As our readership continues to grow we will add many new points of view and share more insights derived from our projects and clients located around the world. As we grow, we want you to feel at home in our next generation of community building with the introduction of MyVillageSolution.com early next year. You can help us grow by adding your own points of view to our blogs and sending your friends links to our site.
Occasionally, one of our readers will ask us questions concerning the services we provide. In brief, we are marketplace crafters in the sense that we define a market opportunity and then craft a built environment to answer the needs of merchants, restaurants, entertainment venues and most importantly the consumer. On the surface, it may appear to the more casual reader that we are something between architects and real estate developers. While we posses many of the same skills, our core competency is our ability to interpret trends both current and future in contemporary culture and translate those into the marketplace. As such, we do extensive market research, create multi retail marketplace concepts, direct the design execution and recruit merchants.
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Tags: development, market, market research, mobile market, Real Estate, Retail, Village Solutions
Posted in Culture, Real Estate, Real Estate Development, Retail, Shopping Centers, Specialty Retail | No Comments »
Friday, September 25th, 2009
Below is a reprint of the article about Village Solutions’ Bellegrove project from Broken Sidewalk.
Bellegrove Executive Campus Rendering
There’s more development activity set for downtown Anchorage, which has been slowly transforming itself over the last couple of years. This time, Village Solutions plans to convert two historic structures and build several new buildings in an effort to create a unique office development centered around a formal English courtyard. The property once belonged to Belleview Home, but was recently sold for redevelopment.
Village Solutions plans to eventually build three new Jeffersonian-style structures to match the historic architecture, anchored by Boone Hall, the original girl’s dormitory at Bellwood. The development, dubbed Bellegrove strives to preserve and protect the environment and create an abundance of green space and gardens. Developer Rick Hill envisions 5 buildings in a botanical garden setting with groves of 100 year old trees all around. Already, a creative center is finishing up construction and a reproduction facility for large-format graphics and printing is planned.
Plans call for leaving much of the 4.5 acre site open. A large “outdoor living room” will link the new structures, that, when complete, could encompass around 22,000 square feet. The site could have supported more than double the space under conventional development standards, but Hill wanted to create a special project for the historic neighborhood. He studied the original layout of the buildings to maintain a perceived master plan following Olmsted principles. (more…)
Tags: Anchorage, Bellegrove, development, green development, Louisville, Olmstead, Village Solutions
Posted in Real Estate, Real Estate Development | No Comments »