Johnston & Co. CEO William Johnston has unveiled a number of amenities for residents in the luxury apartments that will occupy the development’s second through fourth floors.
Those include:
- Resort-style pool with cabanas
- Yoga lawn
- Co-working space replicating a greenhouse
- High-end fitness facility
- Dog park
- Covered parking and garages
- Electric charging stations
- Secured bike storage and repair shop
- Package lockers
- Maker’s space
- Demonstration kitchen
Johnston said many of the amenities have been included to give people more of a sense of community living there than is typical with multifamily housing. He called it a “combination of people doing life together.
“You become a regular at the coffee shop, and then you see them at the cabana and then you see them doing a craft in the maker space, then you're locking your bikes up,” he said. “And pretty soon you create lifelong friendships due to the design features that are here.”
Epicenter, being built through a partnership between Johnston & Co. and Dallas-based StreetLights Residential, is meant to be the walkable urban piece to the agriculturally-themed development.
As for the 320 residential units, they will include studios and one-, two- and three-bedroom options, ranging from 500 to 1,600 square feet.
The units feature 10-foot ceilings, 8-foot doors, granite countertops, stainless steel sinks and appliances, walk-in closets, balconies, dimmable decorative lighting, under-cabinet lighting and urban mud rooms.
Johnston said he especially appreciates the views from the balconies. Depending on where one is in the development, those views can include the Superstition Mountains, San Tan Mountains, McDowell Mountains, Camelback Mountain, Piestewa Peak, Picacho Peak, the Four Peaks as well as the development farm and orchard.
“That's an amenity that I think people will never get tired of,” he said. “It’s hard to find the time to get above the chaos.”
Interest has been high, he said, as developers have captured more than 1,000 emails from people expressing interest in living there.
Johnston said developers expect pre-leasing to begin in the summer and move-ins to start in the third quarter of 2021.
Johnston said the timing seems fortunate with projections of the nation coming out of the pandemic perhaps this summer. People, he said, may be craving the kind of connection that Epicenter is designed to bring.
“It's been a funky year, to say the least, but I will say that Agritopia as a whole has rebounded pretty darn well from everything,” Johnston said.
