The founders of pod architecture + design of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, offer key considerations for building a distillery.
By Doug Pierson and Youn Choi
Distilleries are labors of love. They must be. What other reason is there for sane people to take on such a complicated, often frustrating, and always expensive enterprise both willfully and cheerfully? Having had the pleasure of working with many intrepid entrepreneurs in the industry, [we’re] now convinced that a driving passion for the distillery process and product is the key to coping with all the complexity.
In Louisville, Kentucky, Kaveh Zamanian, a truly courageous client of ours, decided to leave a successful career as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst to relocate to Louisville with his wife, a Louisville native. His purpose: In the heart of that city’s historic downtown district, he would build, own, and operate a new 55,000-square-foot bourbon distillery that would “challenge the status quo and offer a new vision of what an authentic whiskey can be,” he said. He calls his decision to abandon an established, lucrative career to risk everything for a dream “diving down the rabbit hole.” And he named that dream Rabbit Hole Distillery.
Whether you envision a large, urban distillery as Kaveh Zamanian did, or you’ve got your eye on a 3000-square-foot warehouse ca. 1930, know this: The top contributor to the success of the building portion of your future distillery is starting the process as early as possible, beginning with what architects call the Program. Read More…
It’s always better to be over-conscious of details than the opposite.
news and media 