Drive south on Main Street in Mooresville and the smokestack is the thing you notice first. It rises above the tree line near the old textile complex, a leftover from when Mooresville ran on cotton instead of commuters, and it has been part of the skyline for over a century. Most people who live here have driven past it hundreds of times. Fewer could tell you what's actually happening at its base these days.
For years, the answer was: nothing. While the rest of Merino Mill filled in with pizza, burgers, tacos, and antiques, the century-old Powerhouse building that once generated the steam and electricity for the Mooresville Cotton Mills sat untouched, the one structure in the complex nobody had figured out. That changed on October 7, 2025, when it reopened as Florence Wine & Beer Garden, an Italian restaurant with 50-foot ceilings, arched windows, and a patio overlooking a pond that didn't exist when the building was still running machinery.
If you haven't been back to the mill since last summer, here's what you missed, and why the timing says something about where this stretch of South Main Street is headed next.
The Building Nobody Touched
Merino Mill has a longer history of reinvention than most people realize. The property dates to 1893, when it opened as the Moor Quality Turkish Towel Company before becoming a Burlington Mills cotton operation that shut its doors in 1999. Michal Bay, who came to the United States from Turkey at 16, bought the abandoned 1.1-million-square-foot complex in 2010, when the floors were rotting and the roof had holes in it. His original plan wasn't restaurants at all. He wanted to build the region's largest furniture warehouse. The pivot came almost by accident: when Aliño Pizzeria opened and became an instant hit, Bay leased out the surrounding space within two months on the strength of word of mouth alone.
That pattern repeated for over a decade. The Barcelona Burger & Beer Garden followed. Then Picasso, which opened as a taqueria in early 2024 and grew into Picasso Mediterranean with a formal grand opening on July 22, 2025, an event where the mayor presented Bay with a proclamation recognizing the mill's impact on the town. Each opening filled in another section of the sprawling site. But the Powerhouse, with its soaring ceilings and its status as the literal engine room of the old cotton mill, was the one building that took the longest to figure out.
Bay has said he spent close to three years renovating the structure at 518 S. Church Street, preserving the original red brick, the archways, and the ceiling height while adding outdoor lighting and patio seating that didn't exist in the building's working life. He told a reporter the goal was for the space to feel "a little magical." It's a slower, more deliberate build-out than anything else on the property, and it's housed in the one building locals had stopped expecting to see reopened at all.
Why Five Restaurants in One Complex Isn't the Whole Story
It's easy to read Merino Mill as a restaurant row and stop there. That undersells what's actually on the site. Main St. Antiques & Design Center, tucked into another wing of the complex, houses more than 400 vendors under one roof. The mill is also home to corporate tenants that have nothing to do with dining: DEHN USA, a German electrical surge protection manufacturer, located its U.S. headquarters here, a $38.6 million investment expected to create 195 jobs. Greenworks Tools has offices on site as well. And the roof over all of it carries North Carolina's largest rooftop solar installation, a 1.6-megawatt system that quietly powers a chunk of the operation.
On weekends, the Merino Mill Market adds another layer. It runs Fridays from 5 to 7 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., with regular vendors like Bush n' Vine, Barbee Farms, and Your Mom's Donuts setting up alongside rotating local sellers. It's the kind of recurring, low-key event that doesn't make headlines but shapes how people who live nearby actually spend a Saturday morning.
Put it together and the mill isn't a single renovation story that wrapped up years ago. It's still adding pieces. The North Carolina Chapter of the American Planning Association recognized the complex with a "Great Transformation" award back in 2017, and the mill has kept transforming in the years since that award was handed out, not stopped once the plaque went up.
What the Timing Tells You
Picasso Mediterranean's grand opening landed in late July 2025. Florence's followed roughly ten weeks later, in early October. Two openings that close together is a tighter turnaround than the mill kept in its earlier years, when a single new tenant could take a year or more to materialize between Aliño and Barcelona, or between Barcelona and Picasso. Part of that is momentum: once a complex proves it can fill space with successful, low-overhead concepts, the next tenant has an easier case to make. Part of it is that the mill was finally running out of untouched buildings. The Powerhouse was one of the last original mill structures without a modern use, and once it found one, the complex was effectively out of blank spaces.
The Town of Mooresville has also pointed to a planned Moor Park renovation as part of its broader push to keep energizing the south end of downtown, a signal that whatever comes next on this stretch of Main Street isn't likely to be an isolated event. If the mill's history is any guide, the next update won't be a total surprise. It'll be another building that's been sitting quietly, waiting for someone to figure out what it wants to be.
As of mid-2025, the mill was drawing an estimated 110,000 visits a month across its restaurants, antique mall, and market days, according to a local business profile of the property. That's a lot of regular traffic for a building that spent years as a near-teardown, and it's worth remembering the next time you're stuck at the light on South Main and glance up at that smokestack. It's not decoration. It's the marker for a building that finally has an answer.
If you're weighing what a stretch like South Main Street means for property values or your own plans in Mooresville, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these shifts as they happen, not after they've already reshaped the map.
Terese ODell keeps an eye on the developments that change how a neighborhood actually lives, not just how it lists. Schedule a free consultation if you want a local read on what a corner like this means for your own next move.
