International design superstar Philippe Starck and his partners in a Boston condominium project, struggling to sell their luxury units in a stagnant market, have dropped their asking prices an average of 12 percent and hired a new real estate agent.

Developers Starck and Boston-based Urbanica Inc. initially tried to capitalize on the designer’s name, but the Starck brand failed to attract buttoned-down Bostonians to the renovation of the former South End District 4 police station, built in 1932. While that strategy sold out Starck projects in Manhattan and Florida, the Boston project faltered amid a cooling real estate market, construction delays, and criticism by brokers that the prices were too high.

The YooD4 condo project, which was named after Starck’s London firm Yoo Ltd., is being renamed D4. Construction has fully resumed, with workers scurrying through the building yesterday, boring holes for plumbing and wiring.

“It’s a Starck project but we want to focus on the assets of the building,” said Richard Strachan, a manager in Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage’s urban division, which replaced Gibson Domain|Domain as the listing agent.

Interiors in D4, a brick structure with Corinthian pilasters and enormous windows, feature Starck-designed faucets and handpicked, 1-foot-square marble bathroom tile from Tuscany. The two-story penthouses have terraces surrounded by grass growing on the roof. The atrium with a vaulted skylight evokes the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Buyers have signed purchase-and-sale agreements on two of the 26 condos, Strachan said.

“Rebranding a building is not so easy,” said Debra Blair, president of Listing Information Network, which tracks the downtown condo market. “I consider that a challenge” for D4’s developers, she said.

Dan LaBarre, a South End agent for Keller Williams Realty, said D4’s main problem was always the unit prices. With some priced as high as $950 per square foot, they were well above prices even in the trendy South End. As a result, D4 missed out on a hot downtown condo market in 2005, agents said. Sales in downtown Boston have slowed in recent months.

D4 is a “handsome building,” LaBarre said. But “unless they’re doing a substantial price adjustment to reflect the current market,” he said, “which means cutting down on some of the finishes or whatever they have to cut down on, it’s still not going to sell.”

Urbanica and Coldwell Banker said the original Starck finishes are still planned, but prices will be reduced.

Coldwell Banker plans, for example, to relist a three-bedroom penthouse with terrace views of the John Hancock and Prudential towers at $1.65 million. It was first priced at $1.77 million and dropped in July to $1.71 million. A one-bedroom, Unit 104, will be reduced to $600,000 from $670,000.

D4 was taken off the market this summer, and the developers said Gibson Domain|Domain’s contract expired. Coldwell Banker will start relisting some of the condos next week at lower prices. The building originally was scheduled to be completed this fall; the opening date now has been pushed back to late spring 2007.

Gibson Domain|Domain president Nick Russo questioned whether the latest price cuts are enough, especially “if you look at what’s going on around town.” He said that when his firm was D4’s broker, his agents had recommended price reductions of 15 to 18 percent “across the board.”

The complexity of hollowing out a floor-to-ceiling atrium in a delicate historic building was a source of project delays.

Stephen Chung, Urbanica design principal, said his firm’s office is a few blocks away and the decision to supervise construction will ensure D4’s high quality.

Starck’s designs “have to be done a certain way,” he said. “We know how to do the finishes.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 10:52 am and is filed under Condo, Real Estate. Tags: Boston Dan LaBarre Debra Blair Florida Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Keller Williams Listing Information Network London Nick Russo Philippe Starck Prudential real estate agent real estate market Richard Strachan Stephen Chung Urbanica Inc. Yoo Ltd. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.