Peek inside new downtown residential tower

Fifth & West Residences, the 39-story, all-residential tower located Downtown at 501 West Avenue, topped out earlier this month and is predicting it will be Austin’s next condo building to open, likely in fall of 2018.

Developed by Austin's Riverside Resources, the 448-foot-tall tower was designed by Dallas-based GDA Architects, with interiors by local firm Michael Hsu Office of Architecture. It’s bucking trends a little in that it has only residential units—no first-floor restaurants or retail—and only 154 of them at that.

Fifth & West has a total of 154 units, Units range in size from 846 to 2,822 square feet, with an average of 1,754 square feet. There is an average of 4.7 units per floor. Prices range from $575,000 to over $2,090,000. Half the units in the building have been pre-sold.

In addition to its status as a purely residential building, Fifth & West is also departing a bit from the most common, boxy style of residential towers. Instead, it is triangular—a shape that builders chose to maximize views.

All renderings courtesy of Fifth & West

According to architect Michael Hsu, the shape and interiors were created to enhance, first and foremost, the experiences of individual residents. “Fifth & West is a large building,” Hsu explained, “but with a very small community within. So the idea of intimacy has been a part of this project from the beginning. With no restaurant or retail storefronts, it’s a very private place. This heavily informed the interior spaces, which were designed to encourage a closeness among neighbors when they want it, but also distance and anonymity if desired.

“We also aimed to bring a genuine warmth to the interiors,” Hsu said, “with generous displays of naturality all throughout the building. We wanted to capture the woods, the natural green spaces that surround Austin, and bring them in. We strove to create a space truly native to this city, that celebrated the people who lived here. It’s a building that can’t be from anywhere else. It can only exist here.”

Via Fifth & West/Facebook