A hotel, a restaurant and more

The August Development Report issued by the Wake Forest Planning Department was a treasure trove that included a new hotel with adjacent convention center, a restaurant from Sauk City, Wisconsin, and the storage building that transformed itself into a duplex.

The hotel will be an 85-room Tru Hotel, part of the Hilton chain, located on an outparcel in the Wake Forest Crossing shopping center on Capital Boulevard. The address will be 1005 Stadium Drive, and the 3,000-square-foot conference/convention center will be next door. Tru Hotels are designed to appeal to millennials and others looking for affordable lodging. Features include a game area, wi-fi, DirecTV, a game room and a large breakfast bar.

The restaurant is from Wisconsin, and again as with supermarkets, it is targeting North Carolina. It is named Culvers and features their “butterburgers,” made with never-frozen beef, cheese curds, fresh frozen custard, meals cooked to order and what it calls an unwavering dedication to quality and cleanliness. It is planned at 2819 Rogers Road in a line with the Rite-Aid pharmacy and the Starbucks under construction. The  Culvers website says one restaurant is open in Arden and another is planned in the Charlotte area.

And, ah, the storage building. In June Tri-Area Ministries Food Bank on East Holding Avenue was issued a building permit for a 192-square-foot “accessory structure” across the street on 2 acres that had been owned by developer Jim Adams and was purchased in March of this year by ITAC 356 LLC, which is owned by David Smoot, part of the Holding family who lives in the family home on South Main Street. And it was apparently Smoot who sat in a chair at the site, watching the building go up.

The storage facility really did begin to look like a duplex, and Assistant Planning Director Charlie Yokley says Smoot wants to build 21 more which will be called Holding Corners. The project is in the plan approval process, but Yokley said this week there is “some issue with the design because it may not meet the building code” depending on a couple issues. We will watch and see, but at the moment work has been halted.

Jump from the small project to a really large one, the proposed Holden Mason subdivision with 223 lots for single-family houses and 124 townhouse units along Capital Boulevard (U.S. 1) south of Holden Road in Franklin County. “I don’t know for sure why they want to annex the property into Wake Forest, but my assumption is to take advantage of our development regulations that allow for more density,” Yokley said. Greenpointe LLC of Raleigh owned by Jeff Grote of Wake Forest is the developer and the engineer is the Nau Company owned by David Arnold of Rolesville. We will see more details when the project gets to the planning and town boards.

Another large project will be revealed and developed in several pieces, the future of the 30-some acres on Wake Union Church Road at Capital Boulevard, for years the site of Schrader/Bellows and late Parker-Hannifin, where Weingarten once planned Wake Union Place shopping center.

The first project is a 60,000-square-foot Academy Sports and Outdoors. This is a Texas-based company with over 200 stores nationwide, including one in Fayetteville. It appears to offer a wide range of hunting and sports equipment. The next step, Karl Hudson IV with Thalhimer Commercial Real Estate said, is another retail phase, about 120,000 square feet, and then the rest of the land will be given over to townhouses and multi-family buildings. Nothing aside from the sporting goods and hunting store has been submitted to the planning department.

Stewart Engineers are planning a three-story office building at 12753 Wake Union Church Road, a site owned by Donna Rollins Pace of Wake Forest and her sister, Linda Rollins Roberts-Betsch. The house where L.K. and Geneva Stephenson once lived has been razed, and the 2.37 acres are valued at $622,519 by the Wake County Revenue Department. That section of the road can only be accessed from Capital Boulevard by the entry for Country Club Drive.

Crenshaw Corners is planned as a seven-lot retail/commercial subdivision on 15 acres owned by Crenshaw Corners LLC, a company owned by one of Steve Gould’s companies. It is in the northeast corner of the N.C.98 Bypass and Durham Road, and the land is valued at over $2 million. Across Durham Road, it faces the future 298 apartments in Legacy Wake Forest on land bounded by Durham Road, Debarmore Street and the N.C. 98 Bypass. Yokley said the town has approved both the grading and the construction plans for the project.

Finally, Marty and Debbie Ludas have applied to open a banquet facility at 102 North Avenue in the old store building that once housed the Corner Ice Cream Shop.