No disrespect to Ohio’s Big Basket, which was just sold to a preservation-minded developer, but it’s time to draw attention to another duck for sale.
In High Point, North Carolina, just outside Winston-Salem, the owners of a 36-foot-tall building shaped like a Goddard-Townsend-style dresser are selling their precious property. The Triad Business Journal reports that Mark and Carol Milligan have listed High Point’s “Bureau of Information,” as well as an adjacent 2,382-square-foot brick building, for $235,000. The price includes two adjacent lots, and the entire property is zoned for commercial use.
While the brick structure, built in the 1950s, has been home to venues and a furniture showroom, the dresser building’s original chest-of-drawers facade was erected in the 1920s, but travel site Roadside America states the building was renovated in its current configuration in 1996 (the socks are supposed to represent the city’s hosiery industry). The Milligans said the property could be converted to residential, but the residents would have to contend with an awkward layout: there are two half baths only and the kitchen is in the basement.
Carol said her husband bought the property for $90,000 less than three years ago.
“He’s a little eccentric, and likes stuff like that (the facade),” Carol told the Triad Business Journal. “We literally bought it for the lots behind it. The rest was just a perk.”
Why is the couple selling the bureau-ful building so soon?
“I didn’t want to be like the crazy lady who lived in a shoe,” Carol said.
Incidentally, the area has more than one edifice that could be the AT&T Building‘s little sib. Right down the road in Jamestown, home retailer Furnitureland South erected a similar dresser on its storefront. At 80 feet tall, however, it’s the big kid-version of the High Point bureau.
