My company, Prince Concepts, is a real estate development studio, laboratory and office based in Core City, Detroit. We acquire, develop, own and manage land and building projects. The studio works to express personal experience, philosophy and belief through built work. The laboratory tinkers – seeking truth and developing precision. The office organizes – creating value for the company, our tenants and customers.
We restrain where we work and focus on knitting together small to medium sized development projects, over time, to create larger, cohesive projects within and across focused neighborhoods. On the other hand… We diversify what we build and create spaces to live, socialize, work and congregate. Consistent, dedicated, and focused work, within a specific neighborhood, brings us and our surroundings real value.
We create celebrated restaurants, imagine and build award winning residential and mixed-use projects, revive and transform previously abandoned buildings, we even run our own little fun cafe. We also plant copious amounts of trees to create and beautify public spaces and to secure an inspired future. The consistent thread throughout our work: an emphasis on the quality of space, indoor and outdoor, public and private.
Space is our product; we are always exploring, trying to figure out how to offer more of it, at a higher quality, for an accessible price. For us, it isn’t a matter of how much we build, but is more about how inspired where and what we create actually becomes. Detroit inspired this specific philosophy – in a city with space, our objective and ambition was to capture and offer it, not commodify and scale it.
We are real estate developers not investors. Our goal: create value, don’t buy it. With work, we communicate our beliefs. When what we believe is interesting and intelligent, we create value. The more we work, the more efficiently we are able to express what we believe. Philosophically, we believe success is the ability to express belief via work. Art is expression. Work is the sport of exercising expression. Business is the delivery of that expression to the world as value. Our business – the creation and leasing of space. Our work – the projects that manifest such space. Our art – the imperfect and ever evolving interpretation, digestion, and then expression of our entire lived experience.
Our projects are an imperfect and honest attempt to represent all existing conditions. We are optimistic that our work serves as a cultural “timestamp,” marking the people, place, and moment in which they were built. As such, we don’t “build for the future” but, rather, build to represent right now, and in doing so, hope to create something that is timeless because it’s an important marker of the place, time, conditions and people that created it. At the same time, we strive to represent the captured moment with excellence, and choose collaborators that both understand this philosophy, and also understand and exercise their craft at the highest level.
At their best, our projects are beautiful spaces that honestly tell you about the people, time and place they were built, at their worst, they are studies for a next phase.
The results: a body of work across a previously blighted and 99% abandoned neighborhood in Detroit, Core City, where we own and are developing 25 contiguous acres and have completed the development of 200,000 SF of land, the renovation of 70,000 SF of previously derelict, slated to be demolished buildings, the creation of 30 new units of housing across three award winning projects and crafted over 60,000 SF of beautified public space… and counting. Across these projects, over 750 trees have been planted.
Each completed project has been generously awarded at the highest levels in the Architecture world; the portfolio also maintains a 97% occupancy rate.
