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It’s alive.

A 30,000-square-foot structure nicknamed the “Franken-building” by developers (because three separate ones became stitched together over time) long sat vacant at the corner of Southeast Division Street and 31st Avenue. Now, after a renovation led by Green Light Development and Capstone Partners, the former home of Nature’s Fresh Northwest is nearly full of commercial tenants.

Meanwhile, the development team has broken ground on the second phase of its D Street Village project – construction of two four-story apartment buildings nearby.

Chris Nelson, a principal at Capstone Partners, expected the commercial leasing effort to take six months, but the team reached 70 percent by the time the exterior shell was finished.

“I would say we’ll be 100 percent leased by the end of October,” he said of the former grocery store building. “The project has just been really well accepted by the marketplace – both the office lofts upstairs as well as the ground-floor retail and commercial spaces.”

The two-story building features 14 creative office lofts and up to eight retail spaces. The Bollywood Theater, an Indian street food restaurant based in Northeast Portland, will occupy the largest space.

Other tenants include Imperial Bottle Shop and Taproom, a florist called Floare, a Pilates and dance studio called Xtend Barre, and a Korean barbecue/Mexican restaurant called Koi Fusion. Upstairs office users include four psychologists, two mortgage companies, a residential real estate broker, and a structural engineer.

Nelson said a surprising amount of interest came from companies looking to relocate from the central eastside. He said they wanted to be within walking distance of retailers, and were frustrated with the lack of parking in their previous locations.

Parking has been a hot button on Southeast Division Street, but Green Light and Capstone are providing 48 spaces at the nearby multifamily sites that will be available to commercial users during daytime. Mark Desbrow, Green Light’s managing partner, said that was part of the original plan, and was made easier via early neighborhood outreach.

“We were truly open to listening to neighborhood feedback,” he said. “It didn’t feel token; it was real. We made it a priority to incorporate neighborhood comments into the design when it was realistic … The lessons you learn about being a good neighborhood developer are kind of the things you learn in kindergarten – just being a good person and thinking about what it would be like to be in their shoes.”

Desbrow said the surface parking spaces are pre-wired for mechanical car-stacking systems should property owners choose to add them later. One of those owners is New Seasons Market co-founder Stan Amy, who is the managing member of an equity group called ADG III LLC.

Bank of the Cascades provided the construction loan for the development’s $17 million multifamily phase.

One apartment building will be due east of the commercial building (and across the street from the Whiskey Soda Lounge); the other will be kitty-corner of that site (next door to the Matchbox Lounge and Pie Spot). Desbrow said the exterior facade will feature a mixture of fiber cement paneling and Accoya wood – a high-performance material from New Zealand that doesn’t weather easily.

The buildings will also have a series of oriel windows, each with a different colored lamp on display. Desbrow likened the lamps to pieces of “jewelry,” and said the idea is that the color ambience of the building will change depending on who is home.

Amenities will include a fitness room, a rooftop deck with a fireplace and a barbecue pit, bike storage on each floor, and on-site property management – a service not easily feasible for smaller projects. One building will have 55 units; the other will have 30.

Desbrow is targeting a coffee shop or restaurant to occupy one of the ground-floor commercial spaces. Ultimately, the hope is that the three buildings will work together like a village. Nelson said the development team took inspiration from places like the Olympic Mills Commerce Center, the Leftbank Project and the Ecotrust building.

Like the Ecotrust lobby, the D Street Village commercial building features a central courtyard with roll-up doors that spill out onto it. Richard Brown Architect redesigned the commercial building; JDL Construction was the general contractor. STACK Architecture designed the apartments; KeyWay Corp. is the general contractor.

“When I go to the Ecotrust building during the daytime, it feels like a community center or like a cool college student union,” Nelson said. “There’s just a lot of activity and people hanging out doing their thing.”

Nelson said most of the businesses will be open by early December; the two apartment buildings are scheduled for completion in July 2014.