From the listing:
River Mill is one of the oldest manufacturing sites in North Carolina
Not really sure that a factory is the first place I’d think to build a bunch of condos…
…a bit Spartan on the inside. But if stone walls are your thing…
Found by: Marty E.
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Not bad for the money, although I wonder if it’s the best investment. It’s a pretty location (I like the woods) despite being on the underside of a grassy dam and right next to the huge spillway. I wonder what that’s like when/if it floods.
I do like the building, but I don’t think they’ve done nearly enough with it. There’s a ton of potential to really play up the stone and the original use but they seem to have settled for minimal effort, both in design and execution. And
less than a quarter mile downstream from an earthen dam to boot? No thanks.
With such a nice locale (sans the dam) and charismatic building you’d think there’d be a better exterior image. But as the initial listing pic shows, it’s just asphalt and concrete. Even a painted mural on the barrier would help, though repaving the lot and adding plantings would do a lot more. As it is, it just looks institutional. Pics 6-9 are too low rent; they have the same 1970s era backyard accouterments as the middle class suburbs from which I hail. The riverside area is casual, a feel that would best be kept but, again, a bit of a spruce up would help. Nothing fancy, just a bit of definition.
Moving inside, what’s with the stains on the stone in Pics 10, 15, and 17? Did they even try de-greaser? Sand blasting? Anything? And what fool chose to pair a stone wall with a beige tile floor (Pic 10)? That floor drains away every bit of character in the wall by mimicking it very poorly. The room that pairs a stone wall with hardwood floors (Pics 15-18), makes for a much nicer result.
The rooms without stone walls just sit there being bland. (Considering the building’s location one might want to avoid having its interior easily described as looking “washed out,” Pics 11-14.) It’s not just the color, or lack of it – there’s almost no detailing. Pic 12 especially is just sad because it is completely graceless. The spaces, i.e., the volumes, don’t flow, the materials do nothing but exist, and those doors… slabs of gloss-painted cardboard are what they look like. Pic 21 is perhaps the worst. Who wants to live in any building with communal hallways that are dead ringers for one’s high school? Or worse, a hospital?
There does seem to be some hope, though, if Pic 22 is considered. That one image has enough charm, shows enough ways to soften what has too easily been reduced to hard, institutional surroundings, to make me hope that in the right hands the property as a whole might someday blossom.