Yes, it’s true…Lee Danielson is bringing his old hotel project back to the Mall. Only it won’t be called The Landmark, as it was after being re-approved at a February 20 BAR meeting. According to Danielson, the 9-story boutique-style hotel planned for the old Central Fidelity Bank/Boxer Learning building will now be called The Beacon-Charlottesville.

According to developer Oliver Kuttner, who is selling the building back to Danielson after buying it from him last year when the developer’s financing for the hotel project fell through, the name change may have something to do with a hotel that Danielson and his partners developed in South Beach, Florida–a 73-room Art Deco hotel called The Beacon, which was built in 1937 and elaborately renovated from 2004 to 2006. Check it out here.

As for Kuttner, it appears the iconoclastic developer has grown weary of the process of building in Charlottesville, saying there are are too many “variables” in seeing a building through to completion these days.

“I love that building,” says Kuttner, who rescued the old mural in the bank lobby and sought to preserve the building’s history. “And I thought Lee had done a lot of good groundwork. It’s a notch above anything else being built in Charlottesville.”

Indeed, browsing the website of The Beacon’s architect, San Francisco-based Mark Hornberger, it appears the building is in good hands. His firm, Hornberger-Worstell, has designed spas, hotels, resorts, academic buildings, and residences all around the world, including California’s historic Hotel del Coronado. Particularly striking is the 27-story W hotel in San Francisco’s arts and convention district, which has a fitness center and a glass-covered swimming pool, but features lobby and bathroom designs as intimate and dynamic as anything found in a high-end private home.

Read more about the project in the March 1 edition of the Hook.

PHOTO NOTE: This photo shows the Downtown Mall before it was pedestrian, and the Central Fidelity Bank building before it took over the original Woolworth’s building next door and added the black granite facade in 1965. Now it’s poised to become the ritzy Beacon-Charlottesville.

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At the Board of Architectural Review’s February 20 meeting, final plans were approved for renovations to McGuffey Park.

“That’s an interesting project,” says BAR vice-chair Syd Knight. “It’s going to be a park unlike anything Charlottesville has seen.”

Indeed, as reported by the Hook in November 2005, the park will be a kind of “living sculpture,” replete with design “footprints” of a Victorian mansion and kiddie equipment named “the Kuma,” “the Argo,” and “the Spica.”

Designed by free speech wall architects Pete O’Shea and Robert Winstead[error–sorry], the park project has a determined group of North Downtown residents, called Friends of McGuffey Park, who are continuing to raise money for their vision, which could cost as much as $750,000.

Of course, not everyone was happy about changing the old park last time we asked around. Longtime North Downtown resident Frances Walton, 62, thought there were “better uses for the money,” like undergrounding utilities, and believed the push for the park was “generational,” spear-headed as it is by North Downtown’s new crop of residents, many of them young moms.

North Downtown resident Steve Murphy worried about the additional traffic the park might generate and, like Walton, wondered if the money could be better spent. “Why not build a new fancy park for poor people?” he quipped.

PHOTO RIGHT: A photo illustration of the new park by architects O’Shea/Winstead[error–sorry], with children on Spicas

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“It lives,” laughs Charlottesville Board of Architectural Review vice-chair Syd Knight, recalling the previous plans for a two-story CVS building at the intersection of Ridge/McIntire and West Main, which the BAR did not respond well to. “…with a different developer and a different configuration.”

On November 28, the BAR voted to reject a proposed design for the pharmacy on the site of RSC Equipment Rental, a project that had the developer and BAR members at odds for months. At issue was a “false” second-story design, the use of vinyl trim and columns, and the general appropriateness of the design.

“It was like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole,” said Knight at the time. “All the things about the building were not suited to the site.”

“The BAR down there doesn’t understand economics,” groused Richmond-based developer Rob Hargett, who admitted he’d grown impatient and angry with the BAR’s insistence that he follow their guidelines.

The new project, although spearheaded by a less contentious Richmond-based developer named Bob Englander, seems to have grown more ambitious.

At a February 20 BAR meeting, Knight says Englander talked about plans to build a 9-story mixed-use edifice on the site instead of the original three-story building.

“They’re trying to completely rethink the project, and do it right this time,” says Knight.

PHOTO RIGHT: This was the two-story plan for a CVS that the BAR rejected.

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The auction of the “mold house” at the courthouse today at 5pm has been canceled. The company in charge of auctioning the troubled dwelling declined to say why it had been canceled.

The house has been at the center of a spore war, in which the owners alleged in a 2005 Hook cover story that the previous owner, Steve Dudley, as well as the Real Estate III agent who sold the house, Sirlei Kaiser-Ramirez, among others, failed to disclose the presence of mold that would make the family sick.

Some of the parties to the transaction, including a home inspector, allege that they did properly disclose the potential mold problem.

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The controversy over Wintergreen Resort’s decision to partner with a big Charlottesville-based real estate firm has erupted into a federal lawsuit, according to a story in this morning’s Daily Progress.

Mountain Area Realty, which purportedly holds a 30 percent share of the market for properties at the Nelson County mountain playground, is claiming in the suit that the new partnership between Wintergreen and Roy Wheeler Realty Co. could monopolize the market.

The issue first came to light in September with a Hook story by Courteney Stuart.

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Two years ago, Larry Butler and Judit Szaloki had just purchased their first house after saving for years to enter the expensive Charlottesville housing market. At 5pm Friday, what was once their dream house will be auctioned off at the Charlottesville Circuit Court, and the family of six will continue the downwardly mobile slide that began when they set foot in the mold-infested nightmare at 2207 Wayne Avenue.

“We knew it was coming,” says Butler, who hopes that whoever buys it will rent it back to them for a couple of weeks.

Butler and Szaloki contracted to pay $246,000 for the 2,200-square-foot brick rancher off Angus Road that seemed perfect for their four kids and for Szaloki’s day care center, which had been a prime source of income for the family. Two days after they closed on the house (more)

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