Developers Starck and Boston-based Urbanica Inc. initially tried to capitalize on the designer's name, but the Starck brand failed to attract buttoned-down Bostonians to the renovation of the former South End District 4 police station, built in 1932. While that strategy sold out Starck projects in Manhattan and Florida, the Boston project faltered amid a cooling real estate market, construction delays, and criticism by brokers that the prices were too high.
The YooD4 condo project, which was named after Starck's London firm Yoo Ltd., is being renamed D4. Construction has fully resumed, with workers scurrying through the building yesterday, boring holes for plumbing and wiring.
``It's a Starck project but we want to focus on the assets of the building," said Richard Strachan, a manager in Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage's urban division, which replaced Gibson Domain|Domain as the listing agent.
Interiors in D4, a brick structure with Corinthian pilasters and enormous windows, feature Starck-designed faucets and handpicked, 1-foot-square marble bathroom tile from Tuscany. The two-story penthouses have terraces surrounded by grass growing on the roof. The atrium with a vaulted skylight evokes the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Buyers have signed purchase-and-sale agreements on two of the 26 condos, Strachan said.
``Rebranding a building is not so easy," said Debra Blair, president of Listing Information Network, which tracks the downtown condo market. ``I consider that a challenge" for D4's developers, she said.
Dan LaBarre, a South End agent for Keller Williams Realty, said D4's main problem was always the unit prices. With some priced as high as $950 per square foot, they were well above prices even in the trendy South End. As a result, D4 missed out on a hot downtown condo market in 2005, agents said. Sales in downtown Boston have slowed in recent months.
D4 is a ``handsome building," LaBarre said. But ``unless they're doing a substantial price adjustment to reflect the current market," he said, ``which means cutting down on some of the finishes or whatever they have to cut down on, it's still not going to sell."
Urbanica and Coldwell Banker said the original Starck finishes are still planned, but prices will be reduced.
Coldwell Banker plans, for example, to relist a three-bedroom penthouse with terrace views of the John Hancock and Prudential towers at $1.65 million. It was first priced at $1.77 million and dropped in July to $1.71 million. A one-bedroom, Unit 104, will be reduced to $600,000 from $670,000.
D4 was taken off the market this summer, and the developers said Gibson Domain|Domain's contract expired. Coldwell Banker will start relisting some of the condos next week at lower prices. The building originally was scheduled to be completed this fall; the opening date now has been pushed back to late spring 2007.
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Coldwell most likely not the right fit for this development and its marketing needs...we will see shortly in the outcome of the property as they go to at D4 soon.
Source: Boston Globe
Tags: YOOD4, D4, New Condos, Boston Condos, New Condos in Boston, Philippe Starck, Starck Condos
