At their nearly completed $40 million apartment building, known as The Symphony, Scott and Charles Yauck of Milwaukee-based Cobalt Partners notice everything. In the stairwell, walls are marked with blue tape where the paint needs a touch up. Inside one of the building’s 98 apartment units, they double check that all the hardware is fastened tightly.
“I can’t walk into a house without looking for flaws now,” said Charles Yauck, development and project manager at Cobalt.
The Symphony opened to its first residents earlier this month and is the first phase of a 25-acre development in the north shore suburb of Bayside, located at the northwest corner of the intersection of North Port Washington and West Brown Deer roads along I-43. Known as OneNorth, the development is led by Cobalt and Milwaukee-based La Macchia Holdings and is envisioned to be a mixed-use destination development centered around wellness.
The units at The Symphony, designed by Milwaukee architecture firm Rinka, are slightly larger than what some other new apartment buildings offer and have more storage, according to Scott Yauck, president and chief executive officer of Cobalt, as the firm is aiming for what could be considered the “condo alternative” market. Monthly apartment rents range from around $1,650 per month for a 650-square-foot studio unit to $3,400 per month for a 1,700-square-foot unit with three bedrooms.
Like most new apartments, the developers are targeting both young professionals and empty nesters. Given The Symphony’s location and the design of the building, Scott anticipates the building will do particularly well among the empty nester population as well as snowbirds that don’t live in Wisconsin year-round.
“There are a lot of people in the area who want to downsize, but not necessarily to a tiny apartment,” he said. “This is really the only new multifamily project this far north along Lake Michigan. The next closest is probably the newer apartments at Bayshore (in Glendale).”
The ground floor of The Symphony will house the new North Shore Library, spanning approximately 24,000 square feet, which the development team donated to the library as a condo worth $4 million, according to Yauck. The building also has two commercial spaces spanning 4,000 and 2,500 square feet, where tenants are being finalized, and a green space that Cobalt hopes to program with events like movie nights or farmers markets.
The overall OneNorth development is slated to span 25 acres at a total cost of nearly $200 million, Yauck said, with up to five other buildings on the site.
The next building planned is a $40 million senior living facility with approximately 150 units that would be directly south of The Symphony building. Cobalt will likely partner with a senior housing developer for that project, Yauck said.
A parcel west of The Symphony building – which Cobalt gained when the I-43 interchange was redesigned with a smaller footprint – will likely be a retail building with a “curated mix of wellness providers” for services such as massages or red-light therapy, according to Yauck. The northern portion of the site could have two or three buildings, but plans for those parcels have not yet been finalized.
Prior to the OneNorth redevelopment, the site had scattered office and retail properties surrounded by parking lots as well as the Los Paisa restaurant and speakeasy building, which was in a Lannon Stone Tudor structure. The bulk of the properties were owned by William La Macchia of La Macchia Holdings, who acquired them for his previous business ventures. La Macchia founded The Mark Travel Corp., which was known for travel brands including Funjet Vacations. Mark Travel merged with Apple Leisure Group in 2018, and then Hyatt Hotels Corp. acquired the business in 2021.
Cobalt and La Macchia have been in talks to redevelop the property since around 2018, when a first proposal that included a 30-story apartment building was met with resident opposition.
“Story number seven is where you’d start to be able to see the lake,” Yauck said, standing on a fifth-floor balcony. “We did the math.”
The project in many ways resembles the other suburban mixed-use districts Cobalt is known for, including 84South along I-894 in Greenfield and Whitestone Station along I-41 in Menomonee Falls. Both redeveloped large parcels of land with multiple buildings and a mix of uses.
“It’s a lot more brain damage,” Yauck said of the laborious process to get larger projects approved, supported, financed and built. “But we like creating new destinations, really making an impact in the communities we’re working with.”
