S.F.’s residential towers encase tenants in urban luxury

Kristie Locks is making the case for life in Rincon Hill’s newest apartment tower, where rents for a 619-square-foot, one-bedroom unit start at $4,065, and the bells and whistles are state of the art.

An app lets you pay the rent, tell the valet to retrieve your car, or schedule a dog-walker or an in-room massage.

“This is the new way of living,” said Locks, senior leasing agent for the Jasper, which stacks 320 apartments in a 40-story shaft behind the gas station at the entrance to the Bay Bridge.

The Jasper is one extreme of what I call Extreme Living: the packaged lifestyles being dangled before potential residents of all those buildings taking shape above the streets of the city’s northeast corner.

To get a sense of this brave cool world, the one inside many of the buildings I review, I recently visited the marketing centers of three mint-fresh complexes: the Jasper, Lumina and Azure.

The first two are among the crop that has sprung up on Rincon Hill since its height limits were raised in 2005 to allow high-rise housing within walking distance of the Financial District.

[...] there is a dog-washing cubby in the parking garage, plus six bicycle storage rooms, and each unit has a washer and dryer.

The five-story base enfolds an expansive outdoor common area, where Azure’s lounge with its demonstration kitchen spills into an artful terrain that includes three sculptural fountains and a 30-foot-long grilling station: “This is probably what our residents use the most,” said Alex La Flam, whose title is community manager.

La Flam and Corey Warren, a vice president of property management for Azure developer Equity Residential, emphasize the sedate tone of Mission Bay compared to more established — but sometimes troublesome — San Francisco neighborhoods.

The interactive features in Locks’ office include a tower diagram where she can call up a specific unit on a specific floor with a tap of the finger, and the corresponding view appears as well (residents of the tower built by developer Crescent Heights won’t move upstairs until this fall).

Like older sibling Infinity to the east, Lumina places two eight-story podium buildings and a pair of 37- and 42-story towers around a landscaped podium.

Beneath the podium are two shared floors, where lobbies and loading docks share space with an array of amenities that will include an upscale market happy to cater private meals for residents in the upstairs dining room or lounge.