It started over breakfast tacos.
Alan Taylor and Johnny Pritzlaff of Riverbend Development—music mogul Coran Capshaw’s local real estate development company—were digging in one Saturday morning at Beer Run in January, talking about the future of the historic Coca Cola bottling plant at 722 Preston Avenue. The company had recently closed on the old plant, and were trying to figure out what to do with the 38,000 square feet of industrial space.
“I said, ‘What about these guys?’” Taylor remembered. They called over Beer Run co-owners Josh Hunt and John Woodriff, which is how Kardinal Beer Hall & Garden, the stepbrothers’ new restaurant project, became the anchor tenant of the soon-to-be-renovated factory. Hunt was on hand with Taylor, Pritzlaff, and Riverbend construction manager Joe Simpson last week to lead a tour of the sprawling building and talk for the first time about their vision for a retail- and restaurant-filled anchor on one of Charlottesville’s growing commercial corridors.
“It takes a mountain of work,” Taylor said of updating a landmark like the Coke building. “You have to have a great deal of vision.”
The looming structure was designed in 1939 by Washington, D.C. architect Doran S. Platt. The exterior brickwork marks it as a product of its time, with the kind of Art Deco-styling that was also lavished on several other Charlottesville buildings from the interwar era—but none so prominent as this one. Inside, it’s cavernous and raw, with concrete floors, brick walls, and exposed ceiling struts. A shoulder-width twisting stairway leads upstairs, where partitions were added in earlier years to carve out offices.
Tucked away in a far corner on the second floor is a poky, plaster-dusted space the Riverbend guys call the “secret sauce room,” where, for a time, the famed soda syrup was mixed. Simpson pointed out the once-smooth terrazzo underfoot, rough and pebbly thanks to years of acid erosion.
The building’s architecture and its position in local history landed it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places last year, which means Riverbend’s renovation has to be a surprisingly delicate one.
“You see this?” Pritzlaff said, pointing to a single gray ceramic tile among hundreds of lighter ones lining the walls of the old mixing room. Its rounded corners give away its age, he said. It’s historic. “All this tile can be ripped out, but this one has
to stay.”
The mandate to preserve the past extends to everything built before a 1980 addition, which means the developers won’t be adding any dropped ceilings, fancy flooring, or drywall to cover exposed brick. They can, however, punch out concrete fill to replace massive windows, a project started by previous owner and entrepreneur Martin D. Chapman, who bought the building for $2.5 million in 2011 with plans to turn it into a shared working space for biotech startups.
The limitations didn’t stop Riverbend from snapping up the building when Chapman abandoned his plans and listed it for $2.7 million in April of last year. They think the spare interior is a desirable space for open-plan offices, retail, and Hunt’s sprawling beer hall.
And while they haven’t inked final deals with any other tenants yet, Hunt’s happy. He plans to fill some 6,000 square feet with a long bar and communal seating for 250 inside, plus a landscaped patio with 150 more seats, bocce courts, and ping pong (for more, see “Garden party” in this week’s Small Bites column).
“There’s just not that much industrial space here in Charlottesville,” Hunt said. “It’s not like Richmond, where there’s just warehouse after warehouse.”
Not that the overhaul will be easy or cheap. Riverbend plans to put $10 million into the building, said Taylor—new stairs, bathrooms, insulation, HVAC, skylights—and there’s plenty of oversight.
The Entrance Corridor Review Board, the Board of Architectural Review, the Department of Historic Resources: “A number of governing bodies have some kind of control over the project, which means numerous approvals,” he said. “But that’s because everyone is concerned that this Charlottesville landmark is going to be developed in the wrong way. And while the approval process is incredibly time consuming and expensive, it also ensures that the end result will be great.”
For all the hoops left to jump through, the timeline is ambitious; Hunt said he hopes to open in the spring, and Taylor plans to have the rest of the space move-in ready for other businesses not long after. Major construction will start within a month, Taylor said. Already, crews have started demolition inside, hauling out bits and pieces from the building’s past.
“There’s a safe downstairs that no one knows the code to, and it’s too big to handle,” Simpson said. “We’ve got to bring in a torch.”
“If the old Coke formula’s in there,” Pritzlaff joked, “you’ll never see Alan again.”