West Bend, the project which aims to transform the rather bleak site of the dreary River Plaza office building on University across from University Park Village into a mixed-use center of retail, hotel, and office space, has broken ground and gotten underway in the last few days. I’ve managed to grab ahold of a new rendering of the mixed-use project, as seen above. What’s more, I’ve got a site plan as well:

As you can see, the site plan’s not perfect. I’d hope to see a new structure fronting University, rather than a surface parking lot. It would be a simple matter to infill that surface lot at a later date, though. Beyond that, the rest of the plan looks like a pretty nice bit of infill. River Run drops to two lanes and is fronted by plenty of ground-floor retail, and the new infill adds lots of ground-floor retail to the sides leading to the river, too. Even the old office tower gets ground-floor retail.

Another great aspect of the design is the way they’re embracing the river and the Trinity Trails. There will, in fact, be retail fronting the Trinity Trails, which will not only give the tenants a lovely view, but enable great interconnectivity with bicyclists and pedestrians on the trails. It’s a wonderful bit of connectivity. I’d expect to see lots more river-fronting retail as the Trinity River Vision starts to influence things.

What’s also interesting are the tenant names included in some of the spaces. Besides the existing Silver Fox and Swoozie’s restaurants, they are:

Anthropologie
J. Crew
Bebe
Lulu Lemon
Eddie Bauer
Modia
Fig (?)
Cru
Sur La Table
Fossil
Lucky
Brighton

The West Bend site is across University from the ultrapopular University Park Village, which is home to a similar raft of high-end retail (and will be home to Fort Worth’s first Apple Store), so it’s perhaps not surprising that these tenants would want to locate to West Bend.

Look for more updates on West Bend as it progresses. Construction is underway now.