Who will live in Bellevue edifice?
 |
|
||||||||||
It looks like a Mediterranean villa, is named for a Scottish castle and has an entire floor of its three-level garage reserved for the owner's extensive car collection.
Here in Mansionland, almost nothing's shocking anymore, but the building rising on the cusp of old downtown Bellevue continues to pique the interest of those who see it. With its terraced heights and beige, sun-warmed veneer, it looks like something more at home on the Côte d'Azur than staring at the chilly chop of Meydenbauer Bay.
Called Tantallon, the project is owned by a corporation whose managing partner is a group headed by Bruce McCaw. The original Tantallon is a 14th-century castle that sits on a rocky Scottish promontory and is mentioned in Sir Walter Scott's epic "Marmion."
Tantallon 2001 has three floors of underground parking, about 19,000 feet of high-rent office space and 10 condominiums. City building permits estimate its construction cost at $4.5 million.
So who will live there? Try asking.
The application filed with the city coyly states that one of the building's 10 condominiums "is being proposed for a particular but unnamed tenant."
No comment, says the building's architect, when asked who will live there. I'm in the dark, says the leasing agent. At the offices on the site, a man wearing an uncomfortable smile stammers, then shrugs, offering nothing.
"We're just developing an office building, that's all I can tell you," said an official with South Cove Ventures, the property's owner.
The managing partner of South Cove Ventures is Pistol Creek Financial. Its president and board chairman is McCaw, a founding director of McCaw Cellular Communications, whose worth was estimated last year by Forbes magazine at $1.6 billion.
Questions were directed to the South Cove Ventures official, who hung up after declining to comment on whether the billionaire would live there.
For the project to grow so large, Bellevue required nine of the 10 units be senior housing, but not necessarily affordable senior housing. (None has been put up for sale.) The city also allowed one floor of the large garage to be used only by the mysterious owner of that 10th unit, for his estimable car collection.
Pacwest ST Motor Sports, an auto-racing team McCaw owns, is operated out of an adjacent building that will be torn down. McCaw is known for the scores of vintage cars he owns.
The building is to be completed this spring. So far, reviews seem mixed.
"Personally, I liked it the way it was," said 87-year-old Betty Fuson, who has lived across the street the past five years in a pebble-stucco apartment. She pushed her walker to the door and scowled out at the building, but allowed that at least the construction workers had been considerate.
"It's progress," she said. "You can't remain static."
Chris Solomon can be reached at 206-515-5646 or csolomon@seattletimes.com.