Culturally Inspired Multifamily Building Designed by World-Renowned Architecture Firms Celebrates Construction Milestone, One Year After Breaking Ground
Phoenix, AZ – April 10, 2025 – VELA and Ray, along with construction firm Clayco, celebrated a major milestone in the construction progress of Ray Phoenix, a design-forward multifamily residential tower that will soon redefine urban living in downtown Phoenix. On April 3, the teams from VELA, Ray and Clayco came together to celebrate the topping out of Ray Phoenix, marking the completion of the building’s structural framework. The celebratory event brought together project partners and city officials including Nick Benjamin, Principal of VELA, Will Kluczkowski, Head of Real Estate at Ray, Xandon Keating, Deputy Economic Development Director for the City of Phoenix, Ryan Abbott, Clayco President, Southwest Region and Austin Kirkpatrick, Vice President of Construction at Suntec Concrete to toast to the project’s significant construction milestone.
“We are thrilled to reach this important milestone with the Clayco team,” said Nick Benjamin, Principal of VELA. “High-rise construction is not easy, but Clayco and their skilled subcontractors have navigated every challenge we’ve faced so far with speed and skill. It’s been extraordinarily exciting to see the design team’s vision take shape as each floor has been completed. Now that we can see the finish line, we are focusing our energy on welcoming the Phoenix community in early 2026 with an artful residential experience elevated beyond the current market standard.”
Designed by world-renowned architectural firm Johnston Marklee & Associates in partnership with Lamar Johnson Collaborative, featuring interiors by Parts and Labor Design and Ray’s in-house design team, and landscape design by Grace Fuller Design, Ray Phoenix brings a bold, modern aesthetic to the Phoenix skyline. With an aim to enhance the community by making art, architecture, and design highly accessible to its residents, the 26-story, 523,000-square-foot structure will house 401 spacious apartments from studios up to two-bedrooms, complete with floor-to-ceiling windows that offer both mountain and city views.
“With Ray Phoenix, we’re creating more than a residential tower — we’re building a community that integrates art, design, and urban living,” said Will Kluczkowski, Head of Real Estate at Ray. “This milestone brings us one step closer to welcoming residents to an inspired new way of living in downtown Phoenix.”
Located at 777 North Central Avenue, Ray Phoenix’s extensive amenity package includes a fitness center, yoga studio, resort-style pool, communal kitchen and lounge, sunken theater lounge, dog wash stations, gardens, and workspaces, alongside 4,500 square feet of ground-level retail space that will be available to lease. A street-level art gallery and a custom lobby mural by multimedia artist Alex Israel will further establish Ray Phoenix as a cultural destination within the city. The mural is inspired by the Phoenix landscape, where each element is originally captured in a photograph, isolated from its background, and recombined with other elements to form a life-size mural composition.
“This milestone is a celebration of the dedication and craftmanship of the more than 250 men and women who are working to make Ray Phoenix a beautiful and welcoming place to live,” said Ryan Abbott, President, Southwest region at Clayco. “At Clayco, we do more than construct buildings. We help shape the cities and communities where we work. Ray Phoenix adds to the skyline while contributing to the energy and culture of downtown Phoenix.”
Ray Phoenix is on track for completion by early 2026.
About Ray
Ray is a residential development company that is focused on developing space that makes art and culture accessible through daily experiences. Ray’s design approach is aesthetically dynamic, historically informed, and influenced by cultural precedents and practicality with an in-house interior design team which has deep experience in multi-family and hospitality design and processes. Founder Dasha Zhukova Niarchos was inspired to apply her work within cultural institutions and public art spaces into a new category of the built environment. Dasha established the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008, seeking to create a space devoted to the discovery and exploration of global art and culture. Her experience at the museum, particularly observing how people interacted with both the art and architecture, was the catalyst for launching Ray. www.rayisaplace.com
About VELA
VELA is a national real estate development company founded and led by experienced developers Nick Benjamin and Taylor Gray in partnership with Post Road Group. VELA is committed to bringing attainable luxury to the hubs of fast-growing urban markets throughout the United States. VELA’s current portfolio represents more than 3.5 million square feet and more than $1B in development bringing design-forward and lifestyle driven rental buildings to cities in the Southeast, Sunbelt and Mountain West. More information can be found at veladev.com.
About Clayco
Clayco is a full-service, turnkey real estate development, master planning, architecture, engineering, and construction firm that safely and sustainably delivers the highest quality solutions to clients across North America on time, on budget, and above and beyond expectations. With $5.8 billion in revenue for 2023, Clayco specializes in the “art and science of building,” providing fast track, efficient solutions for industrial, commercial, institutional and residential-related building projects. For more information, visit www.claycorp.com.
About Lamar Johnson Collaborative
Lamar Johnson Collaborative (LJC) is a full-service, integrated architecture and design firm. LJC is committed to elevating the art and science of architecture and improving design delivery through collaboration. As an integrated design practice, the firm offers architecture, interior design, urban planning, landscape architecture, sustainability, and quality assurance services through offices in Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and St Louis. As a subsidiary of Clayco, a national design-build construction firm, LJC utilizes a full-service approach to inform design delivery, going beyond traditional quality assurance by ensuring benefits of the design-build delivery method in projects regardless of actual delivery method.