Completion in Sight for Hamilton Landing

NOVATO, CA-A Disney-type ending is in sight for Michael Barker’s $150-million Hamilton Landing project. Next year, 10 years after acquiring a 28-acre piece of the former military base here, his company Barker Pacific will break ground on the final stage of the redevelopment, a new 58,000-sf, environmentally friendly office building at the entrance to the property, which is home to seven historic airplane hangars totaling 400,000 sf.

Thanks to a long-rumored and recently consummated lease, the only two hangars that hadn’t been renovated are well on their way to becoming the new home of ImageMovers Digital, a 3-D animation film studio that became part of Disney in February. With ImageMovers’ long-term lease for the two 60,000-sf hangars and the rest of the project filling up in 2006, Barker is confident about the final stage of development.

“The project is fully entitled so all we have to do is design review; we should be underway around mid-year [2008],” Barker tells GlobeSt.com. “We’re prepared to go forward without any signed tenants but we expect there will be some preleasing. Several existing tenants have expressed a desire to expand, which is why we felt it was important to get this underway as soon as possible.”