More live-work units planned for Skyline

More live-work units are coming to the Skyline Center, the Washington Business Journal reports.

Rob Seldin, the CEO of Highland Square Holdings, has teamed up with the Madison Marquette commercial real estate company to form Madison Highland Live/Work Loft Services LLC. The new company will convert two vacant office buildings, Skyline 4 and 5, into live-work units where tenants can live, run a small business, or do both.

Seldin is already turning three vacant office buildings (Skyline 1, 2, and 3) into live-work units. Together the five buildings comprise 1.5 million square feet.

Related story: Construction of Skyline live/work project well underway

According to WBJ, Seldin sees Bailey’s Crossroads as the center of a growing movement to reposition office buildings for new uses. In 2020, Seldin developed Mission Lofts, a live-work building on Columbia Pike in Bailey’s Crossroads after trying out the concept with e-Lofts in Alexandria in 2017.

Those projects meet zoning rules that allow both residential and office uses. Mission Lofts has more parking than regular apartments to accommodate business clients. It also has extra-thick walls between units, full fiber, backup generators, and closets with enough electric capacity to run servers and copiers.

“The change to hybrid work environments, buoyed by technological advances, has altered retail and then office products,” said Madison Marquette chair Amer Hammour. “To retain and grow value in office buildings, we believe that physical space must provide consumers with the same flexibility, utility, and value as cyberspace.”

Related story: First tenants move in to Mission Lofts

“It was a natural fit to combine our strategic vision, development, and construction expertise with Madison’s broad market reach, financial capacity, operations, and placemaking DNA,” Seldin said. “Working with the Madison Marquette team, we believe the live-work strategy and platform will grow more rapidly, and in exciting ways, to better serve consumers and communities.”

Highland Square and Madison Marquette, the co-developer of The Wharf on D.C.’s Southwest waterfront, plan to extend the live-work concept to other markets in California, the Southeast, New York, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Dallas, Denver, and Salt Lake City.