Local developers hope to turn a former stove factory in the Nashville suburb of Franklin into a national model for adaptive reuse. Last month, the Nashville office of Holladay, led by executive vice president of development Allen Arender, purchased The Factory at Franklin for $56 million. It plans to remake the 20-acre campus into a mixed-use hub for Franklin, Williamson County and Middle Tennessee. The 310,000-square-foot complex of 10 industrial buildings was built in 1929 for stove maker Allen Manufacturing Co. and became home to a succession of factory operators. In 1996, Franklin businessman Calvin Lehew purchased the property and converted it into a retail and entertainment complex. Twenty-five years later, the time is right for a major redevelopment.

Joining Arender as an investor is longtime development partner Ronnie Wenzler, who also is an executive director in the Nashville office of Cushman & Wakefield. The pair have a history of redeveloping historic structures, including a mattress factory, a furniture store, a foundry and a 1960s shopping center. Holladay also has tapped Nashville’s Centric Architecture to help. Commerce + Communities Today contributing editor Ben Johnson spoke with Arender about the duo’s plans.

What was the genesis of this project?

I have been in Nashville about 15 years and I had always known about this property, and having done a good bit of other redevelopment in the city, this always felt like it would be a great opportunity to turn into a real mixed-use hub with the type of buildings and structures that are really hard to find in Williamson County and the Franklin area.

What is your vision for The Factory?

What we see is really this regional magnet that is a 24/7 hub of activity where you have multiple legs of the stool. We will have office. We will have retail. We have two large event spaces that had been used over the years, and we are going to activate those more. We want more activity, more use of that and more people coming to the site, whether it is to work, to shop or to go to events. Hopefully longer term, we have some residential on the site, as well. It will be all types of activation. We will be able to do theater, corporate events, weddings and conferences in venues that can hold from 100 people to 1,500.

What are your plans for the retail portion?

We’re planning for about 60 percent food-and-beverage and 40 percent soft good[s], and there will be a handful of local tenants that have been there for a long time. We also see the potential of such a unique spot and unique location. There is opportunity here to house some brands or stores that maybe [are] the only store or only actual physical location for a brand in the country. On the food-and-beverage side, we see much more of a local/regional operator type going in there.

Are you looking for a major anchor?

We have several conversations going with groups that would serve as semi-anchors. We have a few prime, larger spots that probably will drive the next round of leasing activity, and so we are focused on getting a handful of those things landed before we start really working towards some of the smaller spaces.

How will your experience with historic structures benefit you here?

What we see in The Factory is a little bit of every building that we have done. We have these great steel structures with expansive ceilings and open space. People really appreciate seeing those structures, and the feelings and excitement you get from coming into buildings like that are really hard to re-create anywhere. You can’t build these things today. You have to find them, and you have to peel them back a little bit to discover them. We have heavy timber, we have old wood structures with three layers of brick exteriors, the way that buildings were built in the early 1900s. You get into those and you find things you weren’t expecting, but we have been through enough of them that we can find our way through it with some real solutions. The other trick here is that there are a lot of operating businesses in the buildings now, so we will work through some of the renovations while we keep the other businesses open and try to minimize the impact.

What’s your timeline?

This is going to take several years to get through, but we have already started some of the initial infrastructure work. We are going to be moving some tenants around, and we are going to be changing the entries a little bit, things like that. We don’t intend to start really noticeable work until after the first of the year. Hopefully, by mid-summer next year, you will really be able to see some pretty big changes and [we’ll be] close to opening some new tenants and have some of those anchors coming in.

What about customer reach?

The locals have always known how great Franklin is, and tourists and the people moving to Nashville are discovering it. And that will be part of the story, along with more activation of our event spaces you can come be part of 300 days a year.

You’ve said you want to create a mini city here. How will you do that?

As we come out of the pandemic and people are trying to figure out how to office and where to office and what that new paradigm may look like, there is going to be great demand for these mixed-used centers because business owners and others are going to want to be located in places that their employees want to come to, versus a mandate for them to be there. We want to be a campus where it is kind of fun to get lost, where you can wander in and there is always something new or interesting that might catch your attention. Also, The Factory is now all very inwardly focused, so indoor hallways and shops. We have the ability to flip that a little bit and engage some of the exterior spaces with storefronts and access, so we are going to turn what is a very inwardly focused program into a program that has both interior and exterior access to get into the shops and stores and restaurants.