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ARCHITECTURE, ENGINEERING AND CONSTRUCTION
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Office complex, commercial space anchor music venue
By Jenny Peterson
Contributing Writer
Alarge-scale outdoor music venue plans to start welcoming national and touring musical acts as soon as April when The Refinery on upper Meeting Street opens a 1,500-person capacity amphitheater-style stage.
The venue will be located on the campus of company’s office and commercial space complex on the Upper Peninsula.
A restored passenger railcar from 1956 will serve as a “green room” for acts, a nod to the industrial site which once housed a former oil refinery at 1640 Meeting Street Road.
There are 36 leased office and commercial spaces with varying square footages in two historic buildings at The Refinery, with a brewery and distillery on the ground floor. A 220space parking lot, nearby 300-space garage and bathroom facilities will support the large-scale open outdoor event space in the development’s courtyard.
The amphitheater space will be available for private events, along with The Refinery’s rooftop event space which accommodates 150 people and offers views of downtown Charleston.
The amphitheater will be a venue for a Charleston Wine + Food Festival event in March and the Spoleto Festival has shown interest, said Lindsay Nevin, owner and CEO of Flyway Companies, which developed the project with Mountain Shore Properties.
The Refinery’s two beverage tenants, The Whale, an Asheville-based craft beer collective, and Sweet Grass Vodka, a Charleston vodka distillery, will offer concessions to concert-goers.
Nevin was behind the office space-brewery-distillery-music venue combination, which broke ground in 2019.
“This is a new segment of business for (Flyway Companies) that we have not been involved in (before),” he said. “Our offices are located here, and — as corny as this may sound — the idea of being able to leave the office on a Thursday or Friday afternoon and go downstairs and get a beer and listen to music was really where the idea stemmed from.”
Savannah architecture firm Sottile & Sottile, a longtime Flyway Companies partner, handled design for the
The Refinery office and commercial complex on the Upper Peninsula is opening a large-scale, outdoor music venue. (Photo, Rendering/Provided)
renovated historic buildings along with the curved outdoor stage and curved paths in the open space.
Flyway Companies plans to use local entertainment agency Ear for Music to book local and regional acts along with national booking agencies.
Flyway is still looking for a restaurant tenant to move into a first-floor space equipped with food service safety regulations and 3,000-square-foot outdoor space. The future restaurant will tap into a customer base that includes The Refinery’s office tenants, concertgoers and other visitors.
Aside from the restaurant, every office and commercial space in the Refinery’s two buildings are fully leased, Nevin said. Tenants lean toward local, creative industries and include Hudson Cooper Design, Jane Pope Jewelry, Liollio Architecture, Nice Brands, Ohm Radio, The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Rebecca Atwood Designs, Queen + Knox by Mary Welch Fox of HGTV’s “Breaking Bland” and Cortney Bishop Design.
“COVID threw us a couple of curve balls, but I think we’ve leased up as quickly as any new office project in the Upper Peninsula,” Nevin said. “We also have the ability to build one additional building on the north end of the site, so we’re not completely built out. A performing arts (space) was a piece that we wanted to include in the project. More than anything, I want this to be an asset to the city of Charleston.” CRBJ
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Feb. 7-20, 2022 MUSC pursuing project to centralize students, faculty
By Teri Errico Griffis
tgriffis@scbiznews.com
The state’s oldest public medical college, Medical University of South Carolina, is marking 198 years since it was established, and with it, the board has voted to launch fundraising for a new College of Medicine academic building.
The proposal is to replace the existing Vince Moseley building at the corner of President and Bee streets, creating a stateof-the art, centralized home for students and faculty who are now scattered in buildings across downtown Charleston.
“Our current spaces have pretty much aged out and haven’t kept up with some of the latest developments in education and other activities we want to develop for our students,” Dean of Medicine Dr. Raymond DuBois said. “Most schools of medicine in the country do have a dedicated building for their education and faculty and research efforts, and we just are sort of spread out in several different places.”
The last “new” building for the college was erected around 1955 and Dubois said talks about a new academic space have been ongoing for the past two or three years.
Schools like UNC and Duke are doing the same thing, collecting everyone into one home, said Janet Buffington, administrative coordinator for MUSC, who is focused on the nuts and bolts of the project.
With the recent expansion of MUSC’s health system throughout the state, there’s serious talk of establishing another regional campus around one of them, in addition to facilities in Charleston and Anderson. Such an undertaking, however, would require MUSC to increase its class size and currently, the college doesn’t have enough seats in classrooms to do that.
“We can’t get accredited for more students unless we have more seats,” DuBois said.
And applications are flooding in to MUSC as medical school applications nationwide have risen 16-20% in the last few years.
“Right now, we’re able to recruit some of the most renowned faculty in America to come work for us. The students are high caliber and we’ve been breaking the research record every year at the medical school,” said Derek Brown, associate dean of development for the College of Medicine. “Imagine what would happen if we had a state-of-the-art facility to go with that. Amazing things can happen.”
The appeal of razing the Moseley building is its central location on campus, which makes the spot the most convenient for an academic building. To-date, the college has done a large expansion of its clinical buildings along the Ashley River side of the campus, but DuBois said it’s a pretty far walk for faculty to travel.
“It’s centrally located for the students to be able to do research education, use the library and all these other activities,” DuBois said.
The current structure has a fairly small footprint, with two stories and roughly 10 offices. By building up, the new design would more efficiently use the property. DuBois said next steps will be detailing diagrams and usage of the space, selecting an architecture team and developing a feasibility plan for fundraising.
While MUSC doesn’t have a concrete budget without a final design, Brown has researched what a building of the desired size will cost in terms of dollars per square foot, equipment and so on.
Final fundraising numbers are still to be determined, but to help with feasibility plans, the college has contracted with fundraising firms nationwide.
“We have thousands of donors to this medical school and 9,000 living alumni, so we’ll be talking to many stakeholders to get an understanding of what they feel about the building, are they excited about this opportunity before us, would they be willing to partner with us,” Brown said. “We’re going to need a good amount of support to make this a reality, but the payoff is unbelievable to think about what this could do for our college.”
Ideally, DuBois wants to equip the building with up-to-date modern technology and services where students could work in small groups or on simulations. He’d also like to see the school teach via virtual reality.
“The caliber of students that we’re recruiting now, from my understanding, is really outstanding with some of the best MCAT scores that we’ve had,” Brown said. “They could go to medical school at numerous places and we don’t want to lose out if other schools have more place to study, better technology.”
The College of Medicine has reserves to help support the endeavor and DuBois said MUSC will seek support from the state, which has supported other medical schools in the past. There’s no guarantee MUSC would see any money, though.
Down the line, leaders see more potential projects to the school, including updating MUSC’s main bed tower, along the Ashley River location.
“This college is the oldest medical school in the south. It’s well regarded around the nation,” Brown said. “This new building really will be a symbol of excellence for South Carolina and we’re hoping that a special donor will put their name on it. CRBJ
By Jenny Peterson
Contributing Writer
Now under new ownership, The Charleston Place hotel in downtown Charleston will undergo a multi-million dollar renovation that will “reimagine nearly all aspects” of the 434-room hotel, according to a press release from owner Charleston-based Beemok Hospitality Group.
Beemok Capital, led by Charleston businessman and philanthropist Benjamin Navarro, announced in October 2021 that the company had acquired the property. Beemok’s portfolio includes hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues throughout the Southeast and beyond.
Renovations are set to begin in mid-2023 and will be completed in phases, according to the press release. The hotel will remain open during the multi-year transformation of the lobby, courtyards, guest rooms, suites, spa/wellness center, restaurants, bars, retail, meeting and event spaces and pool.
Charleston Place was built in 1986 as an Omni Hotel in order to spur tourism and revitalize the city. It takes up a block of Market Street between King and Meeting Streets with retail shops on the ground floor and sits across from the historic city market.
“We are grateful to inherit this legacy,” said Casey Lavin, president of Beemok Hospitality Group.
Starting in March, the name will officially transition from Charleston Place, a Belmond Hotel, to The Charleston Place to reflect its new position as a locally-owned and managed independent luxury hotel.
Renovations will be done by Pierre-Yves Rochon, luxury interior design firm with offices in Paris and Chicago, whose portfolio includes the Four Seasons George V in Paris and the Waldorf Astoria in New York and Beverly Hills; Cooper Carry, an Atlanta architecture firm headquartered whose projects include The Sanctuary at Kiawah Island; the Charleston office of LS3P, a multi-disciplinary firm with expertise in historic preservation with projects that include The Spectator Hotel and The Vendue; and Rees Roberts + Partners, an interior and landscape design firm based in New York.
The lobby and other public spaces will be redone by local interior designer Cortney Bishop Design. Bishop will also update the Thoroughbred Club Lounge and Meeting at Market, the hotel’s upscale pub.
“Guests and locals can expect to see additional new programming and installations including high teas, Sunday brunch, daily live music, historical tours, wellness offerings and alliances with local organizations and businesses,” the press release states.
Beemok Hospitality Group’s other current assets include The Cooper Hotel, a 225-room luxury hotel being constructed in partnership with Lowe and the Credit One Bank Stadium and LTP Tennis Center in Charleston. CRBJ
