Article Plans Suburban Houston Warehouse

TGS Cedar Port Industrial Park. Image courtesy of TGS Cedar Port Partners LP

Canada-based online furniture company Article will locate a 507,000-square-foot warehouse—its first fulfillment center in Texas—at TGS Cedar Port Industrial Park in Baytown, Texas, under an agreement reached with TGS Cedar Port Partners LP for the build-to-suit project.

Site work will start this quarter and the warehouse is slated for delivery by the fourth quarter at the largest master-planned, rail-and-barge-served industrial park in the U.S. The industrial park is located off State Highway 99 (Grand Parkway), with access to Interstate 10 and State Highways 225 and 146, as well as the Port of Houston’s Bayport and Barbours Cut container terminals.

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John Simons and Gray Gilbert, both partners at NAI Partners, represented TGS in the transaction. Article was represented by Andrew Lord, senior vice president, and Walker Barnett, principal, at Colliers.

Article, an online direct-to-consumer furniture retailer founded in Vancouver in 2013, has warehouses in Toronto; Seattle; Los Angeles; Jersey City, N.J.; and Jacksonville, Fla. The company has delivered more than 1 million orders across the U.S. and Canada, with its popularity growing during the pandemic when e-commerce began accelerating.

Industrial park growth

Article’s build-to-suit project announcement comes after a year of development activity at Cedar Port, with more than 10 million square feet of warehouses starting construction in 2021. TGS Cedar Port broke ground in late 2021 on three industrial speculative buildings—a 1.2 million-square-foot distribution center delivering in May; a 496,000-square-foot distribution center, expandable to 900,000 square feet that can be rail-served or cross-dock configured delivering in the third quarter of this year; and a 150,000-square-foot rail-served building expandable to 600,000 square feet that will be completed by the fourth quarter.

Construction began in September on the largest of the three buildings, which is the Houston market’s largest speculative industrial warehouse. Development began on the other two warehouses in November. Powers Brown Architecture is designing the three spec facilities and E.E. Reed Construction LP is the general contractor. Simons, Gilbert and Chris Haro, also of NAI Partners, are the leasing agents.

Industry leaders such as Home Depot, Floor & Décor, IKEA, Walmart, Vinmar and Ravago all have major distribution and fulfillment centers in the industrial park. Cedar Port spans approximately 15,000 acres, with more than 11,000 acres available for sale, lease, design, build and build-to-suit developments. It can accommodate developments from 5 to more than 1,000 acres. The industrial park currently has more than 23 million square feet of industrial and manufacturing warehouses that are either under construction or already built.