Boutique retail and a small-scale health foods store might be future tenants of Bellevue Gardens Shopping Center, if the developer gets final approval from the City of Newport for its latest plans.
The goal is to attract retailers that might appeal to the mixed-use project’s 43 condominium owners, said Gary Bliss Garabedian, vice president of Bliss Properties Inc., which is developing the site.
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Each condo is expected to sell for about $1 million, he said.
The condo residents “can walk anywhere around Newport from that central location,” he said, and the 39-foot-tall buildings should allow them to see the ocean.
Attracting high-end retail would help the new shopping center to blend with its “upscale” neighbors along the historic Bellevue Avenue, Garabedian said. And, he said, because it’s a mixed-use site, he hopes service-oriented tenants, such as a hair salon or a dry cleaner, might also be attracted.
The project is still awaiting the final green light from Newport’s planning and zoning officials.
“The Planning Board has to make a recommendation to the Zoning Board,” said Paige Bronk, Newport’s city planner. But “real authorization comes from the Zoning Board.”
Garabedian said it’s been 18 months since the developer first presented the project to the city. Conceptual plans for the shopping center were unanimously shot down by the city’s Historic District Commission in November.
Then, after some major revisions in June, the plans were unanimously approved by the city’s Planning Board, Bronk said. When it came time for the Historic District Commission to review the project for a second time, on Sept. 19, it voted unanimously to approve the revised conceptual plan.
“I think most would agree the use is certainly appropriate and desirable,” Bronk said. “How it’s designed to minimize impact on the community and the neighbors – that is really the focus at the moment.”
John Grosvenor, of Newport Collaborative Architects, said he had made three significant changes to the original design of the development in order to comply with the city’s standards.
The first was reducing the height of the buildings from 45 feet to 39 feet, which cut the number of condos from 54 to 43 and the amount of retail space by 40 percent, from 65,000 square feet to 45,000 square feet.
The second major revision involved “softening an edge” of the development that abutted a residential street, Grosvenor said. “Where we had loading docks, as there are today, we turned it into residential rather than retail.”
Third, the architects tripled the amount of vegetation along the Bellevue Avenue edge of the property, to act as a barrier between the 288-space parking lot and the street, Grosvenor said.
The parking lot had been a bone of contention with the city and the public, he said. Many preferred the residential/
retail buildings to sit closer to Bellevue Avenue, with the parking lot behind. But the merchants preferred to keep parking in front, and so did the architect and the developer.
“If we had moved [the buildings] forward, they would have put all the historic buildings in shadow,” Grosvenor said.
The architects also added 86 new parking spaces for residents, he said, putting them in the basement below the buildings so they would not interfere with retail parking.
And they designed a new “cloak” for CVS/pharmacy, which is the 50-year-old shopping center’s anchor and the only building that won’t be torn down for new construction, Grosvenor said.
But CVS isn’t the only tenant that will be staying in the shopping center. Garabedian said the developer plans to keep all the existing tenants, which include a Newport Creamery among a mix of shops.
“We would relocate existing tenants to the newly developed part of the shopping center once phase one is complete,” he said. “Phase one takes one year to complete.”
The project is expected to cost between $40 million and $60 million, Garabedian said.
“I think it’s a property that certainly can stand for some upgrades,” Bronk said. Although until now Bellevue Gardens has been primarily a retail complex, he added, “mixed-use would benefit the city. It would increase the tax base. It would add vitality to our downtown, given that there are residential units.”
