A church bought the property at 1091 King Street in 1981 for $14,500. Tyler Smyth's company took the site over in August 2025 for a closing cost of $1.6 million. Most of what has happened to upper King sits between those two numbers.
Smyth runs Tyler A. Smyth Architects, a firm that works mostly on custom homes and historic renovations, and he has three Carolopolis Awards from the Preservation Society of Charleston. King Simons is not one of those jobs. The two-story brick building at King and Simons is 34 years old, not historic by any measure, and it spent two decades as a school for the New Israel Reformed Episcopal Church before it went dark.
What's going in.
Crews have been working around the clock raising ceilings across the 10,000 square feet, installing new windows, and replacing the plumbing, electrical and air systems. The former classrooms are being split into 14 potential offices. The cafeteria becomes a first-floor restaurant, and the business that fills it is still to be determined.
The office side is already filling. Local bag maker J. Stark is looking at moving its headquarters in, with shopping and future events attached. Andreucci Design Studio is coming. So is an entrepreneur in Wagner Terrace who will walk to his new office.
"Having the opportunity to have so many local business people bumping into each other in the building is a real positive," Smyth said in the Post & Courier.
Why not housing.
That was the first choice and it died on parking. There is none on site, and the nearest lot is half a block away, which works for an office and does not work for a home. That single constraint is why this became a workplace instead of units.
Why it matters.
Smyth's argument is not about yield. "Having a 10,000-square-foot vacant building is bad by any measure," he said. "It attracts vagrants. It is a void in the city. It's kind of a missing tooth in the city."
Mayor William Cogswell has backed the plan throughout, and he and Smyth have been friends and professional colleagues for years. Cogswell's framing, in a written statement to the Post & Courier, was about supply: peninsula space is limited and rent is not cheap, so bringing long-vacant buildings back into use is what opens the door for small businesses.
Amanda Andreucci spent two years hunting for the right spot for her graphic design business before this one. "Everything about this office is right. It's affordable, it's downtown, on King Street in an up-and-coming area," she said. "What made it awesome was hearing that other people, this amazing community was coming in."
The read.
Gutting a sound building is cheaper than building from the ground up, and Smyth said the price came down after the property sat on the market for some time. That unglamorous math is what actually decides what upper King looks like in five years. He still has months of work to go.
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