New construction is a common sight in Asheville. Take a drive through nearly any part of town and you'll see cranes and construction workers hovering around recently dug foundations and the bright wooden bones of unfinished buildings. But in the midst of all that, you'll also see a different kind of creation as adaptive reuse projects write a new chapter of an old building's story.

As a general architectural term, "adaptive reuse" merely means to reuse an existing building for a different purpose. Often, this will just take the form of something like a retail space becoming a restaurant. But in recent months, the concept has acquired more significance in Asheville, with several unusual adaptive reuse projects taking shape — namely, The Flat Iron Hotel and Cappadocia Church.

Given all the headline real estate these projects have occupied (ours included), it got us wondering what the process actually entails.

Setting and meeting standards

Unsurprisingly, that's a complicated question. Since adaptive reuse covers a lot construction-wise, the process and its requirements rely a lot on the project itself.

According to Chris Collins, the City of Asheville's assistant director of planning and urban design, all building projects go through varying levels of review, based on their size and complications.a And adaptive reuse is no different. The new project just has to meet all of the zoning standards and building regulations set out by the city and the county. At level one, city staff reviews your plans and makes sure you meet requirements with no formal meetings.

Adaptive reuse projects can muddle that quickly, though. "When you take an existing building and reuse it," says Collins, "it's a lot harder to meet all those zoning standards for the site that are easier to meet when you're putting up a new building."

Sometimes your plan can just be adjusted. Sometimes it can't — and the reviews level up.

Reuse finally realized

When several local organizations got together to preserve the Cappadocia Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas, a historically Black church on Max Street, and convert it into three affordable housing apartments, it could have been a level one review from the city. The project was small enough that all it really needed was a member of staff to check out the zoning and site plan.

But because of the way the site was oriented, according to Collins, there was a landscape buffer that they couldn't meet. For a historical building, nestled in a historical neighborhood, there's not much that they could do — except to go through a conditional zoning request to modify the requirement. And that requires approval from the Asheville City Council (which it received).

Although the church itself is highly significant to the neighborhood, the scale of the project was small in terms of size. Further complications arise the larger the project becomes. Luckily, Philip Woollcott of Flatiron Preservation Group, LLC knew this when he and his firm acquired the Flat Iron building in 2019.

The interior of the Flat Iron, which was built in 1926, pays homage to its heyday. | Photo by Dony Dawson

Woollcott was born and raised in Asheville but spent much of his career in Charleston, SC — a career focused on adaptive reuse and historic preservation of old buildings. The Flat Iron opportunity felt like it was decades in the making. "This building was just absolutely one of the most iconic buildings downtown Asheville," says Woollcott. "I remember it as a child."

Woollcott knew this wasn't a project he wanted to take on, fix up, and sell for a profit. He calls it a labor of love, as it always is when adaptively reusing a building. "You're dealing with so many challenges, and they take a long time and cost money and lots of headaches," he says, "but the end result and reward is just so much better than a brand new building."

The challenges were certainly there, though. A project of that size would require millions of dollars in investment, and a building that was still in use as offices at the time, came with a lot of hurdles. Once the company had decided on a hotel as the most economically viable option (tenants' rent prices would have had to be far too high for apartments or offices), the team applied for the National Park Service's Historic Tax Credit program, which required review with very high standards.

Because it was a historical building, it also had to earn a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Historic Resources Commission. And its conditional zoning request had to be approved by the Asheville City Council, a process which took months. In the midst of that process, they also arranged sessions to get feedback from the community, which wasn't always positive.

Woollcott was confident in his team, though. He had known Steve Palmer, founder of Indigo Road Hospitality Group, which manages the property, since 2009 — and when Woollcott called Palmer to start a discussion about the building, Palmer coincidentally had the whole senior team sitting over at the Grove Park Inn. And the partnership began.

With a project like this one, the initial steps are the most daunting. But even so, the company will have to get approval from the NPS (and of course, general city planning approval) for any changes to the historical preservation areas of the space.

But Woollcott believes it's worth it to reuse an old building rather than construct a new one.

"These old places have got their own energy and excitement. An authenticity," says Woollcott. "This old dame of a building has got soul, so we really wanted to be sensitive to that with our renovations. We wanted to cap that vitality of this old building and all the old memories of the building that Asheville holds so dear."