Kirk Rudy, a principal of Endeavor Real Estate Group and chairman of the Real Estate Council of Austin, calls the Whole Foods project a "great use. I can't think of a better solution for that site."

The Whole Foods development will be on the block bounded by Fifth and Sixth streets on the south and north and by Bowie Street and Lamar Boulevard on the west. Work could begin by the end of this year with the store opening and office building occupancy coming by 2005. The grocer will take 170,000 sf of the 200,000-sf building. It will put its corporate offices and southwest regional headquarters into the building. The office tower component calls for a roof-top plaza for community events and gatherings, Sud says. The development will have a minimum of 1,000 parking spaces, according to Sud. About 600 will be in a two- or three-level below-ground garage.

The company has 800 employees in Austin and plans to add more in the coming years. Whole Foods' regional offices currently are situated in a former furniture store and it's looking for an additional 15,000 sf of interim space until the new offices are ready.

Whole Foods has been building bigger stores, but the new project will put it in a size category to rival regular groceries such as H-E-B and Albertsons. Currently, the biggest Whole Foods store is a 50,000-sf market in Seattle, which the company built from the ground up.

The new store, Sud says, could be a model for a new type of Whole Foods store. "It'll be a prototype for an additional type of growth vehicle," he says, "but it's not as though we'll only be rolling these stores out in the future. This is where the opportunity presents itself."

The larger store will enable Whole Foods to expand its offerings and, it hopes, its customer base. "One of the things we've found, over the years as we've developed larger and larger stores. The larger stores we've been able to build gives us the opportunity to draw in more mainstream and crossover customers by giving them a great selection," Sud says.