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| Public tours of The Lumen — Ohio’s tallest residential tower — began this week. NEOtrans took a tour yesterday along with lots of photographs and new information about the latest star to shine on Cleveland’s Playhouse Square (KJP). CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM |
If you want to rent your preferred apartment at Ohio’s tallest residential building, you’d better take a tour of The Lumen soon. But if you want to see what the views look like from the upper floors of the building, wait until summer before booking a tour.
Rental prices, marketing information and guided hard-hat tours began this week at the 34-story, 396-foot-tall apartment tower at 1600 Euclid Ave. in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square district. And on Tuesday of this week, the building got its first signed tenant, said Justin Young, property manager at Greystar for The Lumen.
From now until July 21, the public can take hard-hat guided tours of Ohio’s tallest residential building by booking them via this Eventbrite page. Tours are offered Mondays through Thursdays most weeks. There is no cost to register, but tour group sizes are limited to 10 persons. As of March 5, tours for the rest of March are booked solid.
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| The view from Overture, one of The Lumen’s floorplans avail- able for tours this week. These apartments were furnished for the benefit of tour-goers to provide some examples of what apartments might look like once residents move in (KJP). |
I took a tour this week and was joined by a mix of young and middle-aged apartment seekers. One was a young man who boomeranged via New York City, who was seeking a more affordable urban setting. Another was a woman who lived in Washington DC and grew tired of the traffic there.
Yet another was Daniel Cotter, a local man who was considering renting an apartment at The Lumen but was more curious at this point to see everything that the building had to offer. Unfortunately the early tours aren’t venturing into parts of the building that are still heavily under construction.
“I kinda thought we would see a little more like maybe some of the amenities on the fifth floor that they mentioned,” he said. “I did like the furnished apartments and being able to walk around at will.”
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| Panoramic views of the kitchen and living room in the Overture floorplan above and Ensemble below. Overture has one bedroom, a den and one bathroom while Ensemble has two bedrooms and two baths. These views are from The Lumen’s ninth floor (KJP). |
The tour also went no higher than the ninth floor, which isn’t high up enough to see over several neighboring buildings. Those neighbors include the 22-story Keith Building across Euclid, the 16-story Hanna Building immediately west of The Lumen or the 11-story The Edge apartments immediate east.
On the fifth floor is the amenity deck offering a 22,000-square-foot community room, fireplaces, outdoor television, a heated outdoor pool on the roof of the 550-space parking garage, gas grilling stations, fitness center and yoga studio, plus on-demand fitness classes. The building is pet-friendly, said Matt McClung, senior community manager at Greystar for The Lumen.
Greystar Worldwide, LLC was hired by Playhouse Square Foundation to provide leasing and management functions for the apartment tower. In addition the hard-hat tours starting this week, the official leasing Web site for The Lumen went live this week as well.
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| A panoramic view of the bedroom in Overture. All of the bed- rooms on the tour have windows with shades and curtains (KJP). |
Among the 318 apartments, there are 26 apartment floorplans. There are 6-7 units per level on floors 2-4, 11 units per level on floors 6-32, and six units per floor in the penthouse levels 33 and 34, McClung said.
Rents range from $1,448-1,655 per month for the smallest units called Aria, measuring 571 to 630 square feet. A common-sized, one-bedroom with a den apartment style called Overture, priced at $2,029-2,248 per month, measures 870-918 square feet. A two-bedroom floorplan called Ensemble is priced at $2,752-2,887 per month and measures 1,236 square feet. Ensemble’s price varies depending on what floor it’s on.
Details about these and other floorplans are available in The Lumen’s leasing office. It opened recently across the street from the tower at 1501 Euclid Ave., Suite 112. The leasing office will eventually move into the lobby of the tower, Young said.
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| Each of the apartments on the tour were fully furnished for purposes of display and orientation (KJP). |
As construction progresses, more of the building will be open to tours and, ultimately, move-ins. Young said that floors 1-15 will be available for move-ins starting on June 29, floors 16-20 on Aug. 3, and floors 21-34 opening Aug. 17.
Although the tour didn’t visit the tower’s upper floors, there are still views to be had on the lower floors of The Lumen. Thanks to its design that “leans” over Euclid, the building allows residents and visitors vantage points up and down Cleveland’s main thoroughfare. The lower floors also deliver the street action, which on weekend nights in the second-largest theater district outside of New York City delivers plenty of vibrancy.
And then there’s the windows themselves — they extend from floor to ceiling. They shut out the outside noise although some windows open. A few of the apartments have balconies. In the corner units, those tall windows extend all the way into the corners where there are electrical outlets for someone to place a decorative lamp for reading. Or they can plug in their music without worrying about draining their batteries as they soak up the sights of a city on the rise.
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| Tour-goers and guides mingle in the apartments that were on display. Three floorplans were part of this first week of tours. More parts of the building will be added to the tours as more construction work on the building is completed (KJP). |
The decor is elegantly modern and features simplicity and some gadgets. There are neutral colors, lots of angles, 9-foot-8 ceiling heights, wood-look laminate floors in common areas of apartments, carpeting in the bedrooms and ceramic tile in the bathrooms. Kitchens feature stainless steel appliances, gas stoves, white quartz countertops and tiled backsplashes.
The gadgets include Honeywell smart thermostats,?Schlage control electronic access to apartments and Draper roller shades on the floor-to-ceiling windows. There are soft-close cabinets and walk-in closets with slide-rod shelves.
Although it’s the latest and tallest new residential tower in downtown Cleveland, it certainly won’t be the last. Construction is due to start this summer on the 23-story City Club Apartments, 720 Euclid. There are also for-sale offerings starting to emerge downtown as well to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for housing in Cleveland’s urban core.
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| Other areas of the building were in various stages of construction, with less advanced work done higher up in the building. Yet the lobby still has a ways to go as it was used for construc- tion materials staging (KJP). |
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