NORWALK, CONN. — A joint venture between Saber-Hightower LLC and Granoff Real Estate has announced plans for the repositioning of two vacant office buildings in Norwalk, a coastal town near the Long Island Sound. Development costs of the conversion are estimated at $120 million.
The properties — 101 and 102 Merritt 7 — will be converted into apartment buildings totaling 286 loft-style units. Situated within the Merritt 7 office park, the eight-story buildings together comprise 511,000 square feet and were the first of the six buildings constructed at Merritt 7 in the early 1980s.
Amenities at the redeveloped properties, dubbed M7 Lofts, will include more than 1,300 parking spaces and a landscaped top-level deck with a lawn, swimming pool, dog runs, a putting green and a bocce ball court.
M7 Lofts will offer a mix of 42 studios, 167 one-bedroom units and 77 two-bedroom apartments averaging 983 square feet in size. Twenty-six units will be designated as affordable under the city’s inclusionary requirements.
“While some developers may have looked at these buildings as a teardown-and-rebuild opportunity, we saw the value in reusing what was there,” says Greg Belew, co-founder of Saber-Hightower, which is based in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. “With 11-foot ceilings, wall-to-wall windows and simple floor plates, it was apparent to us that we had great bones to work with. The best approach to adaptive reuse is to keep it simple. We are making no structural modifications to either building, and that lets us control costs and mitigate risk.”
Granoff Architects, an affiliate of Greenwich, Conn.-based Granoff Real Estate, will serve as the project architect.
Completion of the first units is scheduled for late 2027.
Jeffrey Dunne, Eric Apfel, Travis Langer and Eric Greenberg of CBRE arranged the sale of the office buildings on behalf of the seller, an entity doing business as Merritt 7 Venture LLC. CBRE also reports Wind River Holdings as a third member of the acquiring joint venture. Bank OZK provided a $75.5 million senior construction loan to the co-developers.
— Hayden Spiess
