With the approval of the Concord Planning Board, a multi-story building on South Main Street featuring a restaurant, two outdoor patios and event space will now add an additional 16 market-rate apartments to downtown. 

The proposed project was conditionally approved by the Planning Board in December with plans to construct a five-story building featuring three floors of office space. On Wednesday, the board granted Concord developer Stephen Duprey request to scale down the entertainment venue from five stories to four and replace the three stories of office space with two stories of residential housing. 

Construction was slated to begin in April but has since been pushed back to June while Duprey waited for the board’s decision. 

Twelve of the apartments will be 1,000-square-foot studios while the remaining four will feature two bedrooms or more. Residents will have access to permitted parking in a nearby garage where Duprey leases spaces from the city. 

The building, which will be located between the Concord Food Co-op and the bank of the New Hampshire Stage, is designed to feature an eye-catching wooden and steel exterior with a hand-painted mural on the backside of the building. Duprey expects to have a Friendly Toast restaurant on the first floor with two floors of residential housing between an event space on the top floor that will be operated by the Grappone Conference Center. 

Despite scaling back the project, Duprey will maintain all other site plans to include an outdoor patio space behind the building that will feature a freight box kitchen and a country western Nashville-style restaurant and bar in a repurposed barn on the property. 

Duprey has not had luck relocating an 1854 Victorian home that sits on the now-vacant property. The home was approved for demolition last summer and is expected to be torn down but Duprey continues to exhaust his efforts in finding a buyer or someone to accept the 1800s home as a donation and has offered up to $100,000 in moving expenses. Neither the city nor private buyers have expressed interest in the home. 

When the home was first built on the property in the late 1800s, it was run as a bakery by a contractor of the United States Army who made biscuits for the Union troops in the Civil War. The biscuits and bad were carted down Storrs Street and loaded onto trains for shipment. To commemorate the history of the site, Duprey plans to honor the home’s significance in Concord by decorating the barn-style restaurant with historical memorabilia and artifacts taken from the home. 

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