KCLoftCentral was recently featured in the Kansas City Business Journal:
“A soon-to-open residential conversion in Downtown marks a key milestone for a family developer specializing in preserving historic Kansas City buildings.
KCLoftCentral’s April 1 (no fooling) grand opening of Sentinel Lofts at 1003 Walnut St. will become the 30th local adaptive reuse the company’s Bennett family has completed in the past 35 years. The company bought the four-story building in 2022 and since has worked to convert its vacant floors and restore its exterior.
Bennett’s father, John Sr., and late friend Roger Buford built many of the roughly 1,200 new residential units KCLoftCentral has delivered. They started with conversions along Delaware Street in the late 1980s before migrating into the Garment and Library districts around the time officials were expanding federal and state historic tax credits.
“That inspired them to rethink this large stock of buildings that we had Downtown at that time and start utilizing some of these available incentives to basically repopulate Downtown and build a neighborhood down here”
The $8 million repurposing of the Sentinel Federal Savings Building will bring 17 one- and two-bedroom apartments and two ground-floor commercial suites.
KCLoftCentral’s Sentinel Lofts conversion leveraged historic tax credits but did not pursue local tax incentives. The developer will repair and refresh the midcentury analog temperature gauge visible to passersby on the building’s northwest corner.
The Sentinel Federal Savings Building was built in 1914 for businessman and publisher Frederick Bonfils and designed by architect Frederick Gunn. Its earliest tenants included the Jameson Clothes Shop, a cigar company, shoe store and real estate office. The building underwent extensive renovation in 1946 and in 1969 sold to its namesake Sentinel Federal Savings and Loan Association, which leased upper floors to a range of tenants.
Sentinel Lofts joined the National Register of Historic Places as part of a 2020 expansion of the East Ninth Street-Grand Boulevard Historic District. It joins the list of district buildings converted, or planned for conversion, to higher and better uses. Those ranks also include the Rialto Building, which saw the AC Hotel Kansas City Downtown open in 2024, and the Scarritt Building, planned for a 169-room UMusic hotel as part of the $484 million 800 Grand plan.”
Contact us today to schedule a tour of this exciting new apartment community.