Frank Liu Jr. Academy for Music and Arts, 235 N. Norwood Street, Houston, Texas

Houston’s old Folgers coffee plant is getting its first permanent tenant, and it’s a school. The Frank Liu Jr. Academy for Music and Arts, or FLAMA, broke ground Oct. 8, 2026, on part of the 1930s J.A. Folger & Co. plant at 235 N. Norwood Street in the Second Ward, across from Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s Turkey Bend redevelopment.

OMA, led by partner Jason Long, is converting the industrial building into a tuition-free, open-enrollment public charter school for pre-K through eighth grade. Lovett Commercial, which bought the property in 2019 and leased it back to the last coffee operator for a few years, is the client. It’s the same pairing that turned the old Barbara Jordan Post Office into POST Houston.

Project Scope

The school totals 65,120 square feet over three stories inside a plant complex of roughly 250,000 square feet. About 34,590 square feet is education space, 4,500 square feet goes to library and auditorium, 3,490 to administration and 22,540 to back-of-house and support. RDLR Architects is architect of record, with IMEG on structure, DBR Engineering on MEP, Salas O’Brien on acoustics and SWA Group as landscape architect. No general contractor has been named publicly.

Daylight was the hard part. OMA put every classroom on the perimeter and cut new circular skylights over the central commons. Younger kids start at the ground floor and move up through the building as they age. A stair shaped like a French horn anchors the first- and second-grade space, a double-height cafetorium borrows its round opening from a banjo body, and an F-shaped slot in the floor ties the two upper libraries together. Street-facing muntin windows are being restored and upgraded for energy performance, while the courtyard side gets new, brightly colored window divisions.

FLAMA plans to open next August for the 2027-28 school year, starting with kindergarten and first grade and growing to pre-K through eighth. The Frank Liu Jr. Foundation has pledged $20 million toward its first years of operation.

Why It Matters

Industrial-to-school conversions are tough. Floor plates are deep, windows are few, and structure wasn’t designed for classroom loads or acoustics. That’s why the consultant list here leans heavily on acoustics and daylighting, and why the school only occupies part of the plant.

The rest is the bigger bet. Lovett plans to fold the school into a larger development called Fabrica, with commercial, retail and apartments still to be announced. If FLAMA works, the school becomes the anchor that gives the rest of the Folgers site a reason to exist, and Lovett has already shown with POST Houston that it’ll spend on adaptive reuse others would’ve torn down.

Project Team & Details