Joint venture building live-work-play village in Sunnyvale

Hunter Properties and Sares Regis Group of Northern California are building two office buildings and nearly 500 homes in Downtown Sunnyvale.

Hunter, based in Cupertino, and Sares Regis, based in San Mateo, linked up to build the complex under construction at 250 South Taaffe Street, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

It’s the latest project in a new live-work-play neighborhood dubbed Cityline Sunnyvale, to bring housing, offices, shops and restaurants and a 1-acre park to Santa Clara County’s second-largest city.

Sunnyvale contains major offices for such tech firms as Google, Apple, Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and LinkedIn.

The 36-acre Cityline project is led by STC Venture, the joint venture with Hunter Properties and Sares Regis Group. 

It has already completed The Flats and The Flats West, which include 273 apartments and 150,000 square feet of shops and restaurants anchored by a Target store, a Whole Foods Market and an AMC Theater.

The second phase containing three more buildings has been “topped off” and now pushes toward completion at a site bounded by South Taaffe Street, West Washington Avenue, South Murphy Avenue and West McKinley Avenue.

The newest apartment complex is called The Martin, a 479-unit, 12-story luxury highrise, with 29,000 square feet of ground-floor shops and restaurants. It will include a pool and spa, an outdoor club-level deck, fitness centers, a sky lounge on the 11th floor and a 3,000-square-foot rooftop patio.

It’s accompanied by two seven-story, 280,000-square-foot office buildings to contain flexible space, shops and restaurants for a combined 560,000 square feet.

“We have already leased up the first two residential projects in Cityline,” Jeff Smith, director of development for Sares Regis, told the Mercury News. “We got them leased up in record time. Downtown is coming alive with all of the people who are living here.” 

Cityline Sunnyvale, next to the city’s central core, is three blocks from the Sunnyvale Caltrain station. A third phase will include a 155,000-square-foot office and an unspecified housing development.

“Whole Foods is doing very well, and the AMC movie theater is one of the best performers for the movie chain on the West Coast,” Deke Hunter, president of Hunter Properties, told the Mercury News.

But filling up the office buildings may be a challenge during a new era of remote work. 

“In the post-COVID environment, it’s very important to design offices to get people out of the workspace and outside,” said Josh Rupert, director of development for Hunter Partners. “People will be able to walk out to terraces next to their offices.”

Hunter Storm, the development arm of Hunter Properties, this month received a go-ahead to build a 292,500-square-foot office building at its Coleman Highline tech campus in North San Jose.

— Dana Bartholomew