Milwaukee developer Robert Joseph later this month will open a six-story apartment building on North Prospect Avenue, and said 20 of the units there are already leased.
The 88-unit Contour replaced a parking lot and Qdoba Mexican Grill restaurant at 2228 N. Prospect Ave., near East North Avenue. See the attached slideshow for a tour through the project as contractors put on the finishing touches.
It is Joseph’s third apartment development along North Avenue, after his expansion and renovation of the former Prospect Mall in 2013, and construction of a new building on the former Pizza Man restaurant site at North and Oakland avenues.
The Contour skews toward larger apartments than those in Joseph’s other two area buildings, with a model one-bedroom totaling 759 square feet, including its balcony. A showpiece 1,550-square-foot, two-bedroom corner apartment is priced around $2,700 a month.
Joseph said he made the ceilings a little taller, at 10 feet, the hallways a little wider, and other touches to set the building apart in the market.
“I love all the little details,” he said.
Those details include glossy black terra cotta panels on the building exterior, an element that was challenging to build, Joseph said. Crews had to build stainless steel “ladder” structures on the exterior of the building, and hang the terra cotta pieces on them, he said. Joseph Property Development, Joseph's company, is the lead builder.
“I thought this is such an important building, and an important location, let’s use it,” he said.
Contour is the first building in the U.S. to have those black terra cotta panels, said Matt Rinka, of Milwaukee-based Contour architect Rinka. The materials were made in Germany, he said. The exterior material is a callback to historic east side neighborhood buildings that feature ornamental terra cotta on their exteriors, he said.
