A six-story apartment complex along with a Whole Foods Market and a new Hancock Fabrics store are planned for construction at the key intersection of Alaska Street and Fauntleroy Way.

It's a "mixed-use" development of retail and residential called Fauntleroy Place. The stores will be at ground level with their entrances at the corners. Whole Foods Market will be at Alaska Street and Fauntleroy Way, while the entrance to Hancock Fabrics will stand at Alaska Street and 40th Avenue Southwest.

The new development will stretch from Alaska Street north to the West Seattle Bowl.

There will be four floors with 185 apartments - one-, two- and three-bedroom units - above the stores.

Whole Foods Market is an upscale chain that was among the first to take natural and organic foods to the supermarket level. The first store opened in 1980 in Austin, Texas. Now there are more than 180 stores nationwide and Whole Foods Market is a Fortune 500 company.

Whole Foods Market is planned to occupy 45,600 square feet, which is about a third bigger than the size of the average Whole Foods store.

Hancock Fabrics will get a new 14,000-square-foot store in Fauntleroy Place. The new fabric store will be on the floor above Whole Foods and, because the site is on an uphill grade, Hancock's new entrance will be at the corner of Alaska and 40th Avenue Southwest.

Schuck's Auto Supply, which has a store at 3908 S.W. Alaska St., is not part of the future development. No further information about the future of the car-parts store in West Seattle was available.

Four floors of underground parking are planned with 566 parking spaces. About half of those spaces will be for Whole Foods Market.

If approved, construction of Fauntleroy Place is scheduled to start late this year and be completed by mid-2008. The project goes before the West Seattle Design Review Board at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23 in the community room at the Southwest Precinct Station of the Seattle Police Department, 2300 S.W. Webster St..

The project is being developed by Northwest Resource Management Group, a Shoreline company that's built projects mixing retail space with housing in Las Vegas as well as Desert Hot Springs and Indio, Calif.

Northwest Resource Management Group worked for two and a half years to secure the property for the new development, said Eric Radovich, spokesman for the group.

"It's a property that was ripe for redevelopment," he said.

Earlier the Northwest Group tried to convince 24-hour Fitness to be the anchor tenant of Fauntleroy Place. But about six months ago, the developer was approached by Whole Foods Market, whose marketing team had been eyeing West Seattle for a while, Radovich said.

"Whole Foods came to us," he said. "They do extensive demographic research."

Whole Foods Markets are comparable in price to Metropolitan Market, said Mary Ann Odegaard, who lectures on marketing at the University of Washington School of Business. The developers must be convinced there are enough West Seattle residents, ages 50 to 70, with high-enough incomes to make a Whole Foods Market succeed, she said.

Whole Foods' website lists requirements for selecting store locations. There must be at least 200,000 people living within a 20-minute drive and many of them must be college-educated. The building site must be a high traffic location with high visibility and easy access. There also has to be abundant parking for the store's exclusive use.

According to the Seattle Department of Transportation, 13,653 cars a day drive by the site on Fauntleroy Way every day.

Having a Whole Foods Market as an integral part of apartment and condominium developments is a new trend in cities across the nation, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. In some cases, the presence of the natural foods grocery helps seal the deal.

Whole Foods Markets already has stores in the Roosevelt area and Bellevue. The company plans to build more stores in Interbay, Westlake and Redmond.

Tim St. Clair can be contacted at tstclair@robinsonnews.com or 932-0300.