News

Developer plans 12 townhomes on Greenville Highway

A Brevard developer plans 12 townhomes on property north of the Mary Mills Coxe house on Greenville Highway.

By Bill Moss, Published: April 30, 2015

If the Hendersonville Planning Board says OK, homebuyers will have a new close-in option in Hendersonville.

A Brevard developer has filed a development application to build 12 townhouses next to the historic Mary Mills Coxe house on Greenville Highway.
A site plan filed with the city Planning Department shows the 12 units in a line north of the historic home and perpendicular to Greenville Highway. Each townhouse would have 936-square-feet on the ground level and 554 square feet upstairs. City code requires 12 parking spaces but the developer plans to provide 33. Plans call for the owners to access the units from a new private street, called Mills Avenue, that would run between the historic home and the townhomes. The parcel is 1.74-acre.
The developer is Nick Bayne. The project was designed by Stephen P. Jackson Designs of Brevard. The developer plans to keep the historic home, remove an existing two-story house behind it and convert the 1911 carriage house into a clubhouse, according to the site plan.
Built around 1911, the Mary Mills Coxe house at 1210 Greenville Highway is one of the county’s few remaining examples here of pebbledash construction — a rough-textured stucco favored by Richard S. Smith, one of the architects of the Biltmore house. Three bays wide with a two-level side-gabled roof, the 5,660-square-foot 2½-story home is on land that was once part of the vast land holdings of Maj. Theodore G. Barker, a Charleston lawyer who bought Brookland Manor in 1882. In 1907, Barker sold a parcel to Mary Mills Coxe, the wife of Col. Franklin Coxe, a railroad man, timber and mine owner and banker who is credited with driving the Asheville real estate boom in the 1880s.
Mary Mills Coxe’s children sold the home in 1917, three years after her death. It was owned by the James B. Wharton family from 1920 until 1963 and known then as Gray Gables. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building has been a private residence, a bed-and-breakfast and a restaurant. The land and buildings have a tax value of $930,000, according to county records.
The site plan application is subject to review by the planning staff and the Planning Board but not the City Council. The proposal goes before the Planning Board on May 11.