One of downtown Franklin’s most historic buildings has changed hands.
For much of the past two years, former Macon County planner Stacy Guffey has been renovating the Blair Building, otherwise known as the building that houses the Scottish Tartan Museum.
While the other floors are mostly empty at present apart from the museum, its new owner hopes to make it into one of Franklin’s most vibrant spaces with the museum as its centerpiece.
“It was called the Blair Building because the Blairs were the most recent owners,” said Guffey. “The husband passed away, and he was really dedicated to providing a space for the museum. I managed to work out a really good deal on the building with the agreement that the museum could stay here long-term.”
In renovating the building’s first and third floors while allowing the museum to retain its space, Guffey, who sits on the museum’s board of directors, hopes to update four apartments on the top floor and several hundred square feet of office space on the first. With a structure built in 1897, Guffey has been careful to modernize the building while maintaining its original aesthetic.
“There’s a small studio that’s around 550 [square feet], and they range up to 750,” Guffey said of the third-floor apartments. “There’s 3,000 square feet on each level, so it’s a pretty good-sized building. … One of my goals is to make sure that I don’t do anything that changes the character of the building, because I think that’s part of the charm.”
Although updating a 123-year-old building presents a unique set of challenges for Guffey’s remodel, the professional city planning consultant is more than happy to remake a building on Franklin’s Main Street. In considering the address’s history from the 19th century to now, it’s little wonder the museum board member doesn’t want to gut its interior.
“This building was built in 1897, but before that there was another building on this site that burned down,” said Guffey. “[Vice Mayor] Barbara McRae gave me a history sheet on it, and there was a building here that was one of the first buildings in Franklin at the time. It burnt down and then they built this building, and it’s been everything from a department store, a dentist’s office, apartments and the Land Trust for the Little Tennessee, which is now Mainspring, was the most recent tenant upstairs.”
While residential and business tenants will be hard-pressed to find space closer to downtown once Guffey’s renovations are complete, the tenants most happy with the building’s new ownership are the ones already renting space. Between potential buyers with plans to evict them and loss of revenue from this year’s COVID-19 pandemic, the future was not always certain for the Scottish Tartan Museum.
“We’re very excited,” said Kathie Akins, who runs the museum with her husband, Jim. “It’s a big relief because we’ve been here 20 years, and this is just home. We didn’t want to have to go anywhere else. Chances are we probably would have had to close if we had to move because there’s just a lot of stuff here, and this [building] has got such a great atmosphere for the museum that it just wouldn’t be right anywhere else.”
While Guffey is still in the process of updating the building’s first and third floors, he has already rented two upstairs apartments and said he would be willing to forgo rent payments for the bottom-floor offices until renovations are finished. He said he hopes to help Franklin grow into a vibrant downtown in much the same way he has helped towns such as Highlands, Sylva, and Waynesville with his work as a planning consultant.
For the building’s main attraction, Kathie Akins called Guffey’s purchase of the property a ‘blessing,’ but Guffey said the museum should thank Sandy Blair rather than him.
“This is how much [Blair] cared for and loved the museum – she got offered more money by another group that was going to buy the building, but she didn’t accept it because they were going to evict the museum,” Guffey said. “It was that important to her that the museum stay.”