YOU ARE HERE Each month, we’ll throw a dart at a map and write about where it lands. LOCATION: 5101 Monroe Road
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THE NAMESAKE OAKS in the Oakhurst neighborhood are just starting to bud on a spring morning. Cars zip to and from a long string of businesses on Monroe Road in southeast Charlotte, where tax preparers, hairstylists, counselors, and tattoo artists work. This is a commercial corridor. But unlike so many other business districts in a city obsessed with the shiny and new, these businesses occupy single-family homes that date back to the 1920s and ’30s. Their break rooms are family-style kitchens—some renovated, some not.
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Office bathrooms are still outfitted with tubs. Holly Kimsey Evans and her wife considered South End and uptown three years ago when they hunted for a new headquarters for Evans’ real estate business. But a corporate setting just didn’t feel right. They pulled up to a 1928 Georgian fixerupper at 5101 Monroe, at Eaton Road. The pair looked past the wood rot, overgrown hedges, and half-buried swimming pool and instantly saw the possibilities. Now, it’s the stately, gleaming-white
headquarters of the Kimsey Evans Team, with refinished hardwoods, a secondfloor training room that holds 20 in non-COVID times, and a parking lot in the backyard where the swimming pool used to be. Evans says buyers and sellers are more relaxed during closings at her office than in a commercial office building. “When people walk into a commercial space, it just seems so serious. … You feel like you have to whisper,” she says. “Here, they usually walk in and they’re like, ‘This is so beautiful!’ And they talk and enjoy the moment.” —Cristina Bolling
SHAW NIELSEN; CRISTINA BOLLING
Realtor discovered her own rough gem among the old houses-turned-offices on Monroe Road
