Around Town: Carolina Square Hits the Bull’s-Eye

Posted on Sept. 13, 2016

For more than a year, what alumni since the 1960s have known as University Square in downtown Chapel Hill has been undergoing a rebirth as Carolina Square, designed to offer a mix of retail, office and residential space.

Reports were confirmed in late June that some of the red awnings envisioned for the forthcoming development eventually will shade a 16,000-square-foot metro-style Target.

The corporation has been moving into more urban locations with smaller-footprint stores that sell a bit of everything, including groceries. After floating experiments with smaller stores branded City Target and Target Express, the company says the new stores will be renamed … Target.

Also, Carolina Square developer Jeff Furman said two restaurant chains that cater to students have signed leases: Pieology, a build-your-own pizza concept, and b.good, which uses seasonal and locally grown ingredients.

A new University arts facility, announced in May 2015, also is part of the development. The 8,500-square-feet Core@Carolina Square will include an innovation lab, studio and theater. It is envisioned to be the home for artists-in-residence to collaborate with faculty, students and the community.

Carolina Square is expected to debut next summer.

Parking Assist

Heading to Chapel Hill for Homecoming? Everyone knows that parking downtown can be a challenge, especially on game weekends. But give the town credit for trying to make it easier. A new website, parkonthehill.com, spells out the ins and outs of the 950 town-maintained parking spaces, accompanied by a mobile app, so drivers can pay parking fees remotely. Users can see how many cars each lot holds, whether there’s all-day or free night-time parking, where there’s valet parking and where the town’s relatively new centralized meters can be found. The app, Parkmobile, works like similar tools developed for toll-road users. You supply a vehicle license number and credit card information, and the app will tell you when your spot might be about to expire — so you can buy more time while you’re waiting for the check to come or for the Tar Heels to win. Now more than ever, time is money.

Carrboro Gets More Room Service

After a bit of hand-wringing over whether Carrboro really needed another chain hotel, its board of aldermen has approved a second one. The new Hilton Garden Inn is planned to go up next door to the Hampton Inn, behind the Arts Center at 107 Padgette Lane. The new hotel will be managed by the same group that developed the Hampton Inn, which opened in 2013: Laura Van Sant ’88 of Main Street Properties of Chapel Hill LLC, and Manish Atma, whose Atma Hotel Group manages seven other hotels in the Southeast. Atma grew up in the hotel business, working in his parents’ Lion’s Inn motel in Albemarle.

Southern Season Sold

Southern Season, Chapel Hill’s landmark culinary retailer, was sold at auction to a Delaware kitchenwares company in August after filing in June for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The $3.5 million sale to Calvert Retail — owner of six Kitchen & Company and two Reading China & Glass stores on the East Coast — followed several years of expansion by Southern Season into markets outside North Carolina, including in the suburbs of Charleston, S.C., in September 2013 and Richmond, Va., in July 2014. Those two stores on the scale of the Chapel Hill location proved too big to support. The Richmond store closed in April; the Charleston store closed in June.

The company’s longtime flagship store, an anchor tenant in University Place, remains open. The company’s smaller Taste of Southern Season stores in Raleigh, Asheville and Charleston have closed; plans for additional Taste of Southern Season stores in Wilmington and Southern Pines had been suspended before the sale.

Former owner Michael Barefoot ’73 opened A Southern Season in 1975 as a coffee roastery in Eastgate Shopping Center. Three years later, having added other specialty foods to the inventory, he moved the business nearby to space now occupied by Trader Joe’s and added a restaurant, Weathervane. Later, Barefoot opened a mail-order business in Hillsborough for the store’s specialty products. In 2003, he expanded again, moving to the former Belk’s location at what was then known as University Mall and adding cooking classes.

In August 2011, Barefoot sold the company to an investment group headed by Clay Hamner, then a professor at UNC and director of UNC’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Kenan-Flagler Business School. At the time of the sale, Barefoot said the aftereffects of the 2008 recession made him think more about retiring and about offers from Hamner over the years to buy the business. Hamner said then that he envisioned expanding the company to more areas.

Shortly before the auction, Hamner was replaced as CEO. Though the company intially had aimed to come out of bankruptcy by the end of the year, a court-approved restructuring officer said the auction was needed because the company was about to run out of operating cash.

Southern Season, University Place, 201 S. Estes Drive, Chapel Hill, 919-929-7133

A Downtown Hotel Where Less Is More

Downtown Chapel Hill is on track to have a chain hotel, a four-story AC Hotel by Marriott. The boutique-style hotel is planned for the corner of Church and West Rosemary streets, the former site of Los Potrillos, a Mexican restaurant long known for its generous servings and colorful decor. A South Carolina-based hotel-development company bought the corner parcel and two additional lots on West Rosemary. The 68,000-square-foot hotel will have 123 rooms, a ground-floor swimming pool and a 111-space underground parking garage.

According to Marriott’s website, AC hotels target “a new kind of … creative, entrepreneurial and modern global traveler, who prefers to have fewer things but expects them to be better than good.” Marriott now owns 100 hotels modeled on the brand developed in Europe by Spanish hotelier Antonio Catalan. The first American AC hotel opened in New Orleans in 2014. In keeping with AC’s less-is-more philosophy, Marriott has built a handful of ACs in the U.S. Chapel Hill’s will be the first in North Carolina.

The developer plans to feature works by local artists and has commissioned a community mural. The hotel bar, open to the public, will serve tapas.

— Ann Loftin