Commission approves Sugar House development
Sugar House’s building boom looks like it will hold steady over the next few years, including in the immediate area surrounding the Fairmont S-Line Station. On Wednesday, the Salt Lake City Planning Commission approved with conditions a Conditional Building and Site Design Review for the Fairmont, a proposed six-story, 59-unit residential mixed-use development at the southwest corner of Elm Avenue and McClelland Street.
Developers, Lowe Property Group, plan to build the Fairmont on a 0.5-acre surface parking lot. The project will have a mix of one and two bedroom apartments that will range in size from 562 square feet to 1,263 square feet. The development will have five floors of residential above a two story-parking podium with 61 parking stalls. Each unit will have a balcony and floors two through six will be setback at the podium level which will allow for roof decks fronting Elm Avenue and McClelland Street atop the podium.
The two-story lobby and a 1,900-square-foot office will wrap around the parking podium at the ground level. The lobby and office will have a mostly glass, glazed exterior but the residential levels will have an exterior of mostly brick veneer and metal paneling. A fitness center will occupy the second floor directly above a portion of the lobby and will have a similar glass glazing as the ground floor.
To mitigate the project’s impact to the lower density housing directly west of The Fairmont, the developers plan to place a landscaped buffer, dog run and 12 surface parking stalls directly west of the main building and six surface stalls to the south of the main building.
The project will be less than a half-block away from the Fairmont S-Line Station and Fairmont Park and will be the second project under construction in the streetcar station’s immediate vicinity. Construction is actively underway on the Sugarmont Apartments, an eight-story, 352-unit development directly across the street from the site proposed site of The Fairmont on McClelland Street.
In a letter to the planning division, residents of the Sugar House Community Council expressed their support for the project but had concerns that the project could create a tunnel effect on McClelland Street. Residents also lamented the project’s lack of street-level retail.
According to their website, in addition to The Fairmont, the developers plan to build apartments at the site of the now-canceled Dixon Building proposal. Developer Craig Mecham had planned to build a six-story, 180,000-square-foot office space building that also would have been the home to a University of Utah medical clinic. That project fell apart after the University of Utah opted to relocate its clinic to the under-construction Park Avenue development near 1300 East and Interstate 80.
*This is an updated version of a previous post.
