Pritchard Associates Serve Coffee in Oak Lawn, with an Office Tower
The west end of Oak Lawn next to the North Dallas Tollway is getting a coffee shop, that will just happen to be attached to a new multi-story office building.
Located on an irregularly shaped quadrangle lot, the project site is a vacant lot bounded by Knight Street, Fairmount Street, and the North Dallas Tollway frontage road.
Pritchard Associates Inc., the developer, submitted this project in December 2015 and it took all of 2016 for the concept to wind its way through City Hall. Baldwin Associates represented the developer with the land use and zoning issues.
The site area is just under one acre. According to a Development Services Department report, Pritchard proposes a 45,000-square-foot office building that will include a 1,500-square-foot coffee shop that will face Knight Street at the corner of Fairmount.
This property is surrounded by multifamily and single family residential to the north and east, and multi-family and retail to the southeast. City officials commented that the project was compatible, since it creates a buffer between the residential and commercial; Fairmount is kind of the dividing line here.
The prior zoning limited height to 36 feet, but Pritchard asked for and received permission to go up to 85 feet.
“Due to the odd shape of the property and its adjacency to the tollway, staff supports the increase in height and proposed uses,” the city report said.
Most of the land will be occupied by surface parking and landscaping. The building footprint (lot coverage) was reported at 45 percent of the total.
Pritchard went the extra mile on a landscaping scheme. Working with SMR Landscape Architects Inc., the company is including metal fencing, a generous arrangement of trees, raised planters, and benches. The building setback is 10 feet all along Fairmount and Knight.
Boka Powell, the structure architects, describe a building that will feature cantilevered roof eves, balconies and canopies that may encroach up to five feet into the “front yard,” (that would be the set back along Knight).
According to state records, construction is estimated to begin in March and reach completion by April 2018, as a construction cost of about $7 million.