The Lofts at Whitaker Park
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Mixed-use development delivered for Frye Properties. The largest project in Hayco's portfolio by a wide margin and the most recently completed.
Industries We Serve
Mixed-Use Construction
A mixed-use building is two or three buildings sharing a structure. The floor plates are the easy part. The hard part is every line where one use meets another.
Talk to a preconstruction lead235,000 sq ft delivered
The Lofts at Whitaker Park in Winston-Salem, completed Spring 2025.
Two occupancy types
Different code chapters, inspection paths and design consultants answering to one schedule.
Trading through construction
At Thirsty Souls the brewery below kept operating throughout the build above it.
The difficulty is at the seams
Put residential above retail and the building stops being one project. Different occupancy classifications apply to different floors, which means different code chapters, different inspection paths and often different design consultants answering to the same schedule. Four things have to be resolved before anything gets built.
01
Fire separation between uses.
The assembly separating a commercial ground floor from residential above is rated, and every penetration through it has to be detailed and inspected. Mechanical routing that would be trivial in a single-use building becomes a design decision.
02
Acoustic separation.
This is the one owners hear about after move-in. A tenant sleeping above an operating business needs impact and airborne isolation designed into the floor assembly, not added afterwards. In a renovation, the existing structure limits what is possible, so it has to be assessed early.
03
Separate services and metering.
Residential and commercial tenants pay separately, exit separately and are usually served separately. Utility entries, metering, and the electrical and plumbing risers have to be planned around that from the beginning.
04
Separate entrances and egress.
Residents do not walk through a business to get home. Finding a second stair or a second entrance inside an existing building is often the constraint that determines whether the project works at all.
Building above a business that stays open
Mixed-use renovation almost always happens above, beside or underneath something that is still trading. That is not a scheduling detail, it is the governing constraint. Demolition noise and vibration have to be timed around the business below. Material and debris routes cannot run through a customer-facing space. Utility outages affect a tenant whose revenue depends on them.
The Thirsty Souls project is the clearest example in Hayco's portfolio. Two apartment condo units were built out across a vacant 3,000 square foot second floor, above an operational brewery, producing four bedrooms, four full bathrooms and two large kitchens for short-term rental use. The brewery kept trading throughout.
3,000
Sq ft above a working breweryTwo apartment condo units built out while the brewery below kept trading.
Historic buildings and adaptive reuse
A lot of mixed-use work in the Carolinas is downtown adaptive reuse, which means an existing building being asked to do something it was never designed for. Converting a vacant upper floor into residential adds live load the original structure may not have been sized for, and the assessment has to happen before the pro forma is fixed rather than after.
Modern code also applies to a building that predates it. Egress, fire separation, accessibility and energy requirements all have to be met inside a shell that cannot simply be reconfigured. Hayco has done this work in a historic downtown Mount Airy building, and holds related historic-sensitive experience from the 1919 Surry County Judicial Center renovation.
Mixed-use projects Hayco has delivered
Thirsty Souls
Mount Airy, North Carolina
Two apartment condo units built into the vacant second floor of a historic downtown building above an operational brewery: four bedrooms, four full bathrooms and two large kitchens.
Swipe or use the arrows to see all 2 projects.Swipe to see all 2 projects.
These two projects sit at opposite ends of the same discipline. Thirsty Souls is 3,000 square feet of adaptive reuse above a working business. The Lofts at Whitaker Park is 235,000 square feet, completed in 2025, and is the largest project Hayco has delivered. The occupancy separation, acoustic and services logic is the same at both scales.
How mixed-use projects are usually delivered
01
Design-build
suits mixed use better than most typologies, because the separations between uses are a construction problem as much as a design one and resolving them together is faster.
02
Interior upfit
covers adaptive reuse of an existing upper floor, where the shell and the ground-floor tenant are both fixed.
03
General construction
under a completed design fits developers who have already run their own design and entitlement process.
Where Hayco builds mixed use
Mixed-use work has been delivered in North Carolina. Hayco is licensed across North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia, and staffs work from Pilot Mountain and Raleigh, North Carolina, and West Columbia, South Carolina. Related ground-floor commercial experience is covered on the retail and financial services page.
Common questions
Can you build residential above a business that stays open?
Yes. The Thirsty Souls project put two residential units on the vacant second floor of a historic building while the brewery below kept trading. Noise, vibration, access routing and utility outages are planned around the ground-floor tenant rather than around the crew.
What is the largest mixed-use project you have completed?
The Lofts at Whitaker Park, a 235,000 square foot development for Frye Properties completed in Spring 2025.
Do you work on historic downtown buildings?
Yes. The Thirsty Souls conversion was in a historic downtown Mount Airy building, and Hayco delivered renovations to the Surry County Judicial Center, originally built in 1919, with its historic character preserved.
Planning a mixed-use project?
Tell us what goes on each floor, what is already trading in the building and whether the structure is existing. A preconstruction lead will follow up.
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