A conceptual rendering of the Harp’s Landing apartment building planned on the north side of the lake at Libbie Mill-Midtown. (Images courtesy Gumenick Properties)
With two more restaurants about to open and other residential construction underway, Libbie Mill-Midtown is preparing for its next big project that will essentially finish out its allotted number of apartments.
Developer Gumenick Properties plans to start construction this summer on Harp’s Landing, a nearly 400-unit apartment building that will rise on the north side of Libbie Lake, across from Libbie Mill Library and beside the newly constructed Wellsmith Apartments.
With Wellsmith’s 349 apartments, and the nearby Penstock Quarter totaling 327, the 398 units that would come with Harp’s Landing would bring Libbie Mill close to its approved capacity of 1,096 apartments. Add to that the 14-unit Jordan’s Branch Apartments that were completed last year, and Libbie Mill’s total with Harp’s Landing is set to reach 1,088.
In addition to the five-story apartment building, which will total 441,000 square feet, Harp’s Landing is planned to include a single-story, 4,600-square-foot building at the apartments’ southeast corner that’s expected to house a lakeside restaurant. Also part of the project is a children’s play area on the lake’s northwest corner that Gumenick’s Shane Finnegan said residents have been requesting.
An updated site map shows the full Libbie Mill development along Staples Mill Road with the Harp’s Landing apartment building on the north side of the lake.
Finnegan, the company’s vice president of construction and development, said Harp’s Landing would continue meeting demand that was seen with Wellsmith and Penstock Quarter, which are both 95 percent occupied with rents ranging from $1,400 to $3,000 a month. Comparable rents are expected with Harp’s Landing, which Finnegan said would likewise be market-rate.
While Gumenick had considered office development for the roughly 10-acre Harp’s site, Finnegan said it opted for more apartments in light of the pandemic’s effects on the office market and Wellsmith’s lease-up performance last year. Gumenick’s Skip Nash, VP of property management, said in an industry panel event last week that stabilization for Wellsmith was reached last April, five months after move-ins started in November 2021.
Shane Finnegan
“We’ve been working on trying to figure out the remaining pieces of Libbie Mill for quite some time,” Finnegan said this week. “We’ve entertained office concepts in this area of the site numerous times, but at the same time have always known that we wanted to deliver 1,096 apartments within Libbie Mill.
“Emerging from COVID and recognizing the office market as its stands today, we decided several months ago to move forward with developing an apartment building north of the lake,” he said.
Office remains an option for a 2-acre pad site on the west side of the library, where Gumenick proposed, in 2018, a six-story, 142,000-square-foot office building. Finnegan said the company is now considering concepts for a potential retailer for the site, which he said could also be developed as office, residential or a mix of the three.
After that, Finnegan said the only remaining developable land at Libbie Mill would be a few acres it owns along Libbie Avenue and the dozen or so acres that it’s adding at the site’s northwest corner, where Gumenick is in the process of razing 30 homes it has acquired over the past two decades. That acreage will increase Libbie Mill’s footprint from about 80 acres to 92, he said.
For Harp’s Landing, Gumenick secured a development plan approval from Henrico County in November, and Finnegan said it plans to apply for construction permits in March. He said construction is scheduled to start in July and last 27 months, with delivery targeted in mid-2025.
Elevations of Harp’s Landing as the building would appear from the lake. (Henrico documents)
The new apartments would range from studios to three-bedroom units with sizes ranging from 480 to 1,600 square feet. Planned amenities include two internal courtyards, an additional courtyard facing the lake, a pool, a piano bar, and a two-level lounge area with a deck overlooking the lake.
Finnegan said the amenity spaces will be built using cross-laminated timber (CLT) construction, which he said is new to the market and would help distinguish the apartments.
“It’ll create a really warm and open amenity area and set this building apart from Wellsmith and Penstock Quarter,” he said. “We think it’ll be a step above Wellsmith Apartments.”
Finnegan would not disclose the project cost for Harp’s Landing, citing a company policy. KBS is signed on as the general contractor for the project, and Hickok Cole is the architect.
CMTA is the mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineer, ED Lewis & Associates is the civil engineer and Structura is the structural engineer. KP Glass is the site development contractor, and landscape architecture firm Cite Design is handling the amenity spaces.
A rendering of the single-story restaurant building included in the project.
As site work gets underway for the apartments, Finnegan noted that construction continues on Libbie Mill’s for-sale townhomes and condos, with 26 more sold and set to be delivered this month. Forty more are planned to be built in March and April, bringing the total number of for-sale homes built to about 275. Libbie Mill is approved for 996 for-sale homes overall.
The development also includes 200,000 square feet of built commercial space, 12,000 of which remains available for lease, Finnegan said. Colliers International’s Peter Vick and Harrison Hall handle Libbie Mill’s commercial listings.
Anchor tenants include LL Flooring and Shagbark restaurant, as well as Gumenick’s corporate offices. Recent additions include real estate brokerage Samson Properties and Athletico Physical Therapy.
In coming weeks, two more restaurants are slated to open at Libbie Mill: Acacia Mid-Town, which is relocating after a 3-year hiatus and recently held a soft opening, and The Brass Tap, a Florida-based beer bar franchise.
A conceptual rendering of the Harp’s Landing apartment building planned on the north side of the lake at Libbie Mill-Midtown. (Images courtesy Gumenick Properties)
With two more restaurants about to open and other residential construction underway, Libbie Mill-Midtown is preparing for its next big project that will essentially finish out its allotted number of apartments.
Developer Gumenick Properties plans to start construction this summer on Harp’s Landing, a nearly 400-unit apartment building that will rise on the north side of Libbie Lake, across from Libbie Mill Library and beside the newly constructed Wellsmith Apartments.
With Wellsmith’s 349 apartments, and the nearby Penstock Quarter totaling 327, the 398 units that would come with Harp’s Landing would bring Libbie Mill close to its approved capacity of 1,096 apartments. Add to that the 14-unit Jordan’s Branch Apartments that were completed last year, and Libbie Mill’s total with Harp’s Landing is set to reach 1,088.
In addition to the five-story apartment building, which will total 441,000 square feet, Harp’s Landing is planned to include a single-story, 4,600-square-foot building at the apartments’ southeast corner that’s expected to house a lakeside restaurant. Also part of the project is a children’s play area on the lake’s northwest corner that Gumenick’s Shane Finnegan said residents have been requesting.
An updated site map shows the full Libbie Mill development along Staples Mill Road with the Harp’s Landing apartment building on the north side of the lake.
Finnegan, the company’s vice president of construction and development, said Harp’s Landing would continue meeting demand that was seen with Wellsmith and Penstock Quarter, which are both 95 percent occupied with rents ranging from $1,400 to $3,000 a month. Comparable rents are expected with Harp’s Landing, which Finnegan said would likewise be market-rate.
While Gumenick had considered office development for the roughly 10-acre Harp’s site, Finnegan said it opted for more apartments in light of the pandemic’s effects on the office market and Wellsmith’s lease-up performance last year. Gumenick’s Skip Nash, VP of property management, said in an industry panel event last week that stabilization for Wellsmith was reached last April, five months after move-ins started in November 2021.
Shane Finnegan
“We’ve been working on trying to figure out the remaining pieces of Libbie Mill for quite some time,” Finnegan said this week. “We’ve entertained office concepts in this area of the site numerous times, but at the same time have always known that we wanted to deliver 1,096 apartments within Libbie Mill.
“Emerging from COVID and recognizing the office market as its stands today, we decided several months ago to move forward with developing an apartment building north of the lake,” he said.
Office remains an option for a 2-acre pad site on the west side of the library, where Gumenick proposed, in 2018, a six-story, 142,000-square-foot office building. Finnegan said the company is now considering concepts for a potential retailer for the site, which he said could also be developed as office, residential or a mix of the three.
After that, Finnegan said the only remaining developable land at Libbie Mill would be a few acres it owns along Libbie Avenue and the dozen or so acres that it’s adding at the site’s northwest corner, where Gumenick is in the process of razing 30 homes it has acquired over the past two decades. That acreage will increase Libbie Mill’s footprint from about 80 acres to 92, he said.
For Harp’s Landing, Gumenick secured a development plan approval from Henrico County in November, and Finnegan said it plans to apply for construction permits in March. He said construction is scheduled to start in July and last 27 months, with delivery targeted in mid-2025.
Elevations of Harp’s Landing as the building would appear from the lake. (Henrico documents)
The new apartments would range from studios to three-bedroom units with sizes ranging from 480 to 1,600 square feet. Planned amenities include two internal courtyards, an additional courtyard facing the lake, a pool, a piano bar, and a two-level lounge area with a deck overlooking the lake.
Finnegan said the amenity spaces will be built using cross-laminated timber (CLT) construction, which he said is new to the market and would help distinguish the apartments.
“It’ll create a really warm and open amenity area and set this building apart from Wellsmith and Penstock Quarter,” he said. “We think it’ll be a step above Wellsmith Apartments.”
Finnegan would not disclose the project cost for Harp’s Landing, citing a company policy. KBS is signed on as the general contractor for the project, and Hickok Cole is the architect.
CMTA is the mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineer, ED Lewis & Associates is the civil engineer and Structura is the structural engineer. KP Glass is the site development contractor, and landscape architecture firm Cite Design is handling the amenity spaces.
A rendering of the single-story restaurant building included in the project.
As site work gets underway for the apartments, Finnegan noted that construction continues on Libbie Mill’s for-sale townhomes and condos, with 26 more sold and set to be delivered this month. Forty more are planned to be built in March and April, bringing the total number of for-sale homes built to about 275. Libbie Mill is approved for 996 for-sale homes overall.
The development also includes 200,000 square feet of built commercial space, 12,000 of which remains available for lease, Finnegan said. Colliers International’s Peter Vick and Harrison Hall handle Libbie Mill’s commercial listings.
Anchor tenants include LL Flooring and Shagbark restaurant, as well as Gumenick’s corporate offices. Recent additions include real estate brokerage Samson Properties and Athletico Physical Therapy.
In coming weeks, two more restaurants are slated to open at Libbie Mill: Acacia Mid-Town, which is relocating after a 3-year hiatus and recently held a soft opening, and The Brass Tap, a Florida-based beer bar franchise.
If there’s another area regionally that undergone a more dramatic transformation than this, I cannot think of it. After the old apartments were raised and before construction resumed, I’d occasionally grab a sandwich and park in the shade of one of the streets on site for lunch and wonder how they’d pull it off. I heard the naysayers about the proposed development say that Gumenick had bit off more than the site could handle. It’s apparent that they knew what they could do.congratulations.
This TOD-without-the-T stuff is nonsense. If the developers and the county really wanted to be smart with this plan, they would include better transit service. Increasing service on the 18 to every 30 minutes from early morning to late night 7 days a week would be easy and quick, but an extension of the Pulse along Staples Mill to the Amtrak station would be a slam dunk. Instead, they’re covering half the development in surface parking. It’s embarrassing.
I believe the surface parking is essentially putting the land in a holding pattern for more development.
Why do you think that?
The wording in the article seems to indicate that after this is complete they won’t be adding any more new buildings, at least not housing.
OMG more people who are critics who likely couldn’t even build one house, much less an entire large development….
The Pulse is fine, but I really doubt that residents here are taking the bus to their job at Kroger. These apartments are too expensive for that. Cars are still essential in Richmond, no matter what transportation dreamers tell you.
Other developers please take note. This is what multi-family should look like. It is not cookie cutter and provides character to the area versus being dependent on existing character. Good design elements include variations on the facade to break up the lazy linear repetitive design seen in many new developments. Plus, in addition to creating a great selling point for the units, the top floor setback and balconies provides a proper cap to a well designed structure. Well done all around.
Yeah! I am a big fan of Libby Mill — it’s not perfect, but I’ve been around a bit and perfection is not something I’ve seen a lot of — there is ALWAYS something wrong, esp if you ask enough different people — this one is pretty awesome compared to most — and I am surprised that they could make the builds as expensive-looking as they have!
That Wawa is gonna get either crazy packed or have to expand. I do love this development’s look though. The lights on the office buildings are a nice touch.
Perhaps that is why they are building a second location nearby on the old Arby’s site.
My favorite new-build development in the Richmond Metro that I am aware of. Glad that it has made enough money so far that they can keep going with it!!!
I realize this particular project is in Henrico but I read with interest yesterday an article in the Richmond Times Dispatch that said the city of Richmond only had .2% population growth in the last two years or just .1% per year. At least once a week for what seems like the last four or five years there have been announcements of another apartment project in Scott’s Addition or Manchester or infill elsewhere from anywhere from 100 units to 500 or larger. That .1% rate quoted works out to only about 230 new people each year. Certainly more apartments are… Read more »
Roger,
You’ve got your decimal point in the wrong place. The growth is 2%. Here’s a quote from the RTD story: The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, which publishes annual population estimates between censuses for Virginia’s cities and counties, found that the Richmond area grew by 2.1%, or 27,640 people, from 2020 to July 2022.
Read further in the article. Your quote is for the Richmond AREA. Further in the article they state the 0.2% rate. I find this interesting as well. It looks like the localities with more apartment complexes being announced have lower rates.
Libbie Mill is in Henrico..not the city.