By Dawn Pearson
The latest recipient of the town’s Façade Grant Program is Ken Price, owner of the Potpourri Building.
Ken Price is excited about his award for restoration to the back of his building that faces First Street (the front which faces North Main is not being restored). He and ZBD are holding off on starting the reconstruction until next spring to save money on construction costs during winter.
“The Zionsville Façade Grant Program was set up to enhance the face of your building,” Price said. “The budget comes from our town council, it is administered by the Zionsville Architectural Review Committee. What (the ZARC) did yesterday is give a commitment they will fund it and we have to work out details. We agreed we won’t agree on final funding until next spring.”
The preliminary cost to restore the back of Price’s Potpourri building is $39,000 and he is hoping for the gran to approve 40 percent of that.
Contractors for his Façade Grant rehabilitation are Burkhard Construction, for general contracting, Mushalla Electric, for lighting and electrical, Indy Kaldahl, for painting, and Beyond Architecture, for architecture.
“I love our building and what we’ve accomplished,” Price said. “This group of tenants is great right now too.”
The Potpourri Building is like much of Zionsville folklore too, shrouded in mystery and stories. According to Price his building is famous even outside of Zionsville for a couple different reasons.
“This building was at one time one complex and all they did was wedding gowns,” Price said. “We still get an occasional mother with daughter coming in looking for that special dress.”
And the history on the building is sketchy at best, including the original architectural drawings.
“It was built in the late 40s, early 50s but we don’t know exactly when. The interesting part is there were fires in the records department in Lebanon and almost everything about the building was lost in the fire,” Price said.
Even the only rendering of the building layout has little details.
“The only drawing of it has parcel numbers and boxes laid next to each other, just sketched out, like a kid’s drawing,” Price, a trained civil engineer, said.
But even with a lack of traceable history for it’s early beginnings the Potpourri Building will remain a part of the business district’s future.
“The real story about this building, since 2012, is the number of tenants,” Price said. “It was four retail spaces and what we’ve done in the last year is covert it into seven spaces, including the retail front on North Main. The back is an alley with pipes, air conditions and facility equipment and with the grant, First Street will look like Main Street, but more modern than Main, it will be pretty and beautiful and all the utilities will be hidden, it will be a vast improvement.”
Price, 72, and his wife Christine, also 72, own CK Price Properties, LLC., which has residential holdings and the Potpourri Building, a project he hopes to see completed when he retires. He is now CEO of Heritage Environmental Services, of Indianapolis.
For buildings owners to be eligible for a façade rehabilitation grant they must meet three criteria:
- The property must be in or contiguous to the Zionsville Business District.
- The rehabilitation must be visible from a public way
- The rehabilitation projects must contribute to the enhancement and character of the building a well as ZBD.
