The Dairy Market is now open, the reincarnation of the Monticello Dairy building, a once-lost historic landmark in Charlottesville, VA.
Cunningham | Quill worked with Stony Point Development Group to design a mixed-use project that enhances and expands the original dairy manufacturing facility, built in 1937, featuring an ice cream parlor, community gathering and event space, and a huge dairy-cow sculpture that greeted visitors from the front lawn.
“We’re so proud of what we’ve accomplished with Dairy Market and our adaptive-reuse work over the past three years,” Cunningham | Quill’s Associate Principal John Michael Day says. “Our goal with this project was to create a community-oriented space that preserved and respected the historic aspects of the original and beloved Monticello Dairy building while also breathing new life into it and giving it a new purpose.” (More details can be found in our first post)
The current project includes a new Class-A office building to the rear of Dairy Market’s food hall and event space.
Now that it’s open, visitors can walk through the original façade to the food hall. The entry offers a new terraced landscape with enlarged patios, new building signage and architectural lighting to encourage outdoor dining while providing a buffer from the local street traffic. This design strategy also refocuses attention to the Georgian-influenced architectural details and carefully restored steel-framed windows of the old Monticello Dairy, giving it new life but beautifully linking it to the past.
The sun-filled main entrance foyer of the Dairy Market features a new double-height space that required portions of the second floor to be removed, showcasing the clerestory windows. A whimsical cow mural on the building’s exterior pays homage to the old statue, as well as all the Virginia dairy farmers who’ve supported the Charlottesville community across generations. The Cunningham | Quill team designed the interiors as a modern-industrial interpretation of the original ice cream parlor’s black-and-white palette.
The office building’s exterior uses slightly glazed iron-spot brick as a seamless transition to, but clear delineation from, the Virginia red brick found on the Dairy Market building.
The architects also chose verdigris patina copper and gray zinc as large iconic elements on the addition’s new façade; both metals are traditionally found on historic civic buildings, used for durability and to convey the building’s significance. The office lobby behind the market features bricks stamped “Old Virginia” that were salvaged front the original building during construction.
Large expanses of energy-efficient glass curtainwall admit ample natural light into the new offices – an unmistakable shift from the historically influenced market to the modern-day addition.
“There’s a spirit reborn in the Dairy Market and it’s now in a better place to serve the community,” says Cunningham | Quill’s Michael Day. “It offers a welcoming and engaging space to fondly recall the past while creating new memories.”