Apartment Choice

The 155- unit Ann Arbor City Apartments is under construction on West Washington and South First streets in downtown Ann Arbor . Daniel Brenner | AnnArbor.com Editor's note: The number of parking spaces to be held by Village Green has been corrected. Related story: Rent comparison : What can you get for $2,500 a month around Ann Arbor? Luxury apartments in downtown Ann Arbor are no longer just for students. The under-construction Ann Arbor City Apartments on the southeast corner of West Washington and South First streets is the first luxury apartment project built downtown in years that doesn’t cater to students. It’s designed for young professional renters as well as corporate relocation. "It's midway between the YMCA and the core of downtown where U-M jobs are," said Susan Pollay , executive director of Ann Arbor's Downtown Development Authority . "I think it feels like, from what I saw, exactly one of the things needed in this marketplace." ...

Buy Photo The Ann Arbor City Apartments in Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor is seeing a building boom of apartments and condos for the last couple of years that continues to ramp up. (Photo: Romain Blanquart/ Detroit Free Press ) Buy Photo An unprecedented building boom of apartment high -rises and condos has made construction cranes a lingering fixture of the Ann Arbor skyline . No fewer than six cranes hovered over downtown last week as private developers raced to erect more luxury student and post-collegiate housing within walking distance to University of Michigan classrooms. The half- dozen residential projects that are under construction or slated to begin are the latest round in a boom that has been under way for at least three years and is permanently altering the city's housing situation. Many of the current and earlier developments specifically cater to U-M students, offering additional near- campus living options aside from blocks of grubby old houses. Other projects have ta...

I t is obligatory, when writing about the Thames-side village of Sonning, to quote Jerome K Jerome. In his 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat he said: “It is the most fairy-like little nook on the whole river. It is more like a stage village than one built of bricks and mortar.” It has retained these charms but now there is another name to drop: George Clooney. He and his wife, Amal, bought a £10m house here in 2014. They are the latest in a long line of celebrity residents of this village four miles east of Reading, from Terence Rattigan to, er, Uri Geller. I arrive expecting to see Clooneys around every corner. Alas, it isn’t to be: perhaps they are in one of their other houses, in LA, Lake Como, or Mexico … But enough celeb-stalking; I’m here to check out the Great House at Sonning, which reopened in May after a major refurbishment. The main building is a Grade II- listed Elizabethan inn , with gardens spilling down to the river. There are more rooms around the courtyard – 49 in all, fr...

A decade after the crash, Shannon Valley housing estate , on the outskirts of Ballaghaderreen, in Co Roscommon, remains unfinished and partly in ruins. Although the number of “ unfinished housing developments ” has fallen sharply since 2010, Shannon Valley is one of hundreds that still dot the country. The Guls: ‘Every day I put rats in the bin’ Fatima Gul says her little brother, Yousaf, doesn’t like the rats. He jumps up on the sofa or the table in the living room when they come into the house. Their parents don’t allow Fatimar, who is 10, or her nine-year-old sister, Maryam, or Yousaf and his twin, Zohra, who are five, to play near the houses on the other side of their green. It’s too close to the rats and the rubble. Shannon Valley “ ghost estate ” outside Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon. Photograph: Simon Carswell" height="349" src="https://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.3181475!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg" width="620...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...