Headed south in the main shipping channel in Narragansett Bay, when your boat rounds the southwestern tip of Bristol, it’s difficult to miss the Carnegie Abbey Tower, a luminous white, 220-foot-tall condominium tower rising up from the Portsmouth shoreline.
And when the tower opens this month, there will be residents inside looking back. That’s because about half of the tower’s 79 units, residences between 900 square feet and 7,000 square feet, have been sold, O’Neill Properties Group LP Senior Vice President of Development Edward Lopes said recently.
“Obviously the tower is the centerpiece of residential [property] here, from a luxury standpoint,” he said.
For three years, Lopes has overseen the King of Prussia, Pa.-based development firm’s Rhode Island operations. Those operations include the 400-acre Carnegie Abbey Club – complete with an 18-hole private golf course – that when it’s built-out will have 21 cottages, 24 suites in two buildings, golf residences, 34 parcels for home sites and the tower.
The tower’s condos range in price from $799,000 to $5.4 million, with one $14.5 million penthouse that hasn’t been sold. Most of the Carnegie properties are about $800 per square foot, with the 25 clubhouse and golf lodge residences closer to $1,000 per square foot, according to data supplied by the company.
When the project is at full build-out, the company will have invested about $1 billion in Portsmouth on about 744 acres. That includes two parcels that are yet to be developed, Lopes said.
“We’re probably about a third of the way through right now,” he added.
Build-out is still a few years away, but Lopes put the development’s annual tax bill at about $10 million – about a fifth of the town’s annual budget – when it’s completed. And because most Carnegie owners won’t be staying for longer than a few weeks each year, they won’t have children in the local school system, Lopes added.
In December, the 350-acre club was awarded a five-star rating in two categories by the International Americas Property Awards Competition, an annual development contest sponsored by CNBC and The New York Times.
The ratings were awarded in the Best Golf Development and Best High-rise Development categories. It was one of two United States golf developments to earn the rating – the other was Pronghorn in Bend, Ore. – and one of three high-rises.
“These awards represent a continuing effort by everyone associated with Carnegie Abbey to provide the very best to our members and our property owners,” founder and CEO J. Brian O’Neill said in a statement. “This passion for excellence in everything we do has created a very unique lifestyle for our club members.”
O’Neill focuses on acquiring abandoned or underutilized industrial sites and transforming them. Many of the properties that it works with are brownfield sites, as was some of the land that’s now part of Carnegie Abbey. On the site where the Carnegie Tower is now, there used to be an equal-size tower used as a wire-manufacturing facility by the Kaiser Aluminum Company.
“It went defunct in the mid-1980s and it just sat vacant,” Lopes said. “We tore down the old steel structure and in its place we built the current Carnegie Tower.”
O’Neill also recently purchased the former Weyerhaeuser Company’s site north of the club.
“That was a former lumber yard and processing plant for the Weyerhaeuser Company and most recently it was used as a marine terminal,” Lopes said.
O’Neill is now in the permitting phase for a 152-unit luxury housing, equestrian center and beach club, called Carnegie Beach Club.
There will be public access to the site, too. The company recently received master plan approval from Portsmouth for a 1,500-linear-foot marina and shopping center on the Hood property, just south of the club. •
