A long-planned redevelopment concept for a parking lot in Piedmont Road’s Buckhead Place shopping center is getting a revamp that ditches a hotel and tweaks an apartment building.
Buckhead-based Wood Partners’ plan focuses on the lot at 3314 Piedmont Road, next to a Hampton Inn & Suites hotel and in front of an L.A. Fitness. The plan, still in a preliminary form, was vetted Feb. 3 by the Development Review Committee of Special Public Interest District 9, a local zoning area.
The plan calls for a 290-unit apartment building fronting on Piedmont. Standing roughly 90 feet tall, the S-shaped building would have five residential levels and three parking levels, one of them partly below-grade. The garage would have 527 parking spaces, including replacement of the existing 150 surface spaces.
The preliminary plan shows a unit breakdown of 35 studios, 185 one-bedrooms, 55 two-bedrooms and 15 three-bedrooms.
The development team said there is no provision for “affordable” units, though they would be open to a program of subsidized rents for police officers and firefighters offered by the Buckhead Community Improvement District and Livable Buckhead, whose executive director, Denise Starling, is a DRC member.
The Piedmont streetfront would include a two-story, glassy leasing and lobby area.
The development would have a main driveway on Piedmont and a “motor court” for ride-share and similar services.
The service entrance would be in the rear, off a private section of Maple Drive. DRC members spotted that as a likely issue, because city code requires “active uses” on any ground-floor part of such a building that faces a street. Starling suggested the DRC would support a variation request for that service use if the developers added a mural or similar feature to the street-facing wall, which project architect Ben Hudgins said might work.
Hudgins also was receptive to Starling’s idea of placing some type of sculpture in the lobby area where it could be seen from the street. Public art is among the DRC’s priorities.
The project came before the DRC because it would require a special administrative permit due to the location within SPI-9, among other public review processes.