Flagship Kerns Opens in South Knoxville

Knoxville Urban Guy·
Development
·19 Comments
Flagship Kerns, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021
Flagship Kerns, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021

The first of three phases of development of the Kerns Bakery site is complete, with the opening of Flagship Kerns, a 160 unit apartment complex on top of the hill overlooking the Kerns Bakery Building, with a view of the city and UT campus. The development opened in January.

The development consists of two buildings with eighty one and two bedroom apartments in each. One building has been opened, with the other being held, likely until summer. In the weeks the first building has been open, it is approaching fifty percent capacity.

Flagship Kerns Model Home, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021
Flagship Kerns Model Home, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021
Flagship Kerns Model Home, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021

The units come fully furnished (though there is an unfurnished option), and include washer and dryer, as well as 55 inch, mounted televisions. Leases start at just three months and the two bedroom units allow for split leases. New residents do not have to set up utilities, as each unit is metered individually and charged with rent.

The development is designed to attract graduate students and young professionals. Early residents include a group of traveling nurses, people awaiting completion of homes currently under construction and others. The units feature smart thermostats and keyless doors, opened by scanners or by an app.

Flagship Kerns Clubhouse, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021
Flagship Kerns Clubhouse, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021
Flagship Kerns Clubhouse, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021

The entire site, including the Kern’s Food Hall and a to-be-named hotel, which will be new construction, are being developed by Mallory and Evans. As a result, the site will be inter-connected, with steps linking the apartments directly to the Kern’s Food Hall below. A pedestrian bridge will lead from the site to the parking garage on Blount Avenue.

The apartments are within an fifteen to twenty minute walk of the heart of downtown and an even short bike ride. Additionally, a trail is planned to lead directly from the site to Mead’s Quarry and the Urban Wilderness.

Flagship Kerns Fitness Center, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021
Flagship Kerns Fitness Center, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021

One bedroom units include 672 square feet and cost $1299 per month, while two-bedroom units include 852 square feet and lease for $1798 per month. Split leases for the two bedroom units cost $899 per month, per person.

Flagship Kerns as seen from Kern’s Food Hall, 2110 Chapman Highway, Knoxville, March 2021

Also included in the first phase of development is a clubhouse with a computer center, conference room, lounge areas, a fitness facility and a pool. Pets are welcome, but come with extra fees.

Next up we’ll look at current plans and timelines for the Kern’s Food Hall.

Previous ArticleThe Brewing and Distilling Center Expands
Next ArticlePlans Set for Kern’s Food Hall + Market

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19 Responses

  1. Oh my. Yet another one. Not too pretty to look at. Those big black hats they are wearing make them even a bit more unattractive. I understand that the five-story apartment block is the epitome of low-cost, multi-family construction. But how many more of these must our city endure?

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    1. What is the purpose of the “big black hat?” I wondered that when I looked at it. I also imagined how amazing a rooftop deck would be at that location.

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      1. Thank you. The article was very informative. I had assumed that the reason for the proliferation of these wood framed apartment blocks was largely economic: just cheaper. While the article supports that notion, it also balanced the “taking the cheap way out” explanation with the huge need for more dense urban, lower cost housing that lower construction costs help fulfill. Let’s hope modern fire codes can prevent the kinds of massive fire disasters that were common in times past.

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      2. That is a very helpful article. Thanks. But what is the purpose of the big black hat on the building? It wasn’t mentioned in the article and none of those buildings had that.

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        1. My guess would be that the owner did not want to spend the money on a flat roof structure with TPO membrane, internal roof drains, etc. like even boring designs such as Marble Alley did. They likely wanted to have a higher sloped roof that they could use asphalt shingles, and thought they were being “trendy” by doing a single sloped roof with a big black hat/forehead. Except their desire to be trendy on a budget made the building look dated and cheap. They would have been better off facing that forehead the other direction, where you didn’t see it, or doing a standard gabled or hipped roof.

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      3. That’s a really interesting article, thanks for sharing. In downtown Knoxville right now, I notice that Stockyard Lofts seems to be using the approach described in this article (presumably it will have that same look (and the renderings seem to confirm that), while the development up at the old Supreme Court site seems to be pouring concrete. Assuming the latter holds, this is two ends of the spectrum right here in our own backyard.

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        1. No. Both stockyard lofts and church and Henley (Supreme Court) are utilizing a concrete podium structure on the first two (or three) floors with five floors of wood construction above.

          1 Riverwalk is all wood construction, like marble alley. Regus square used a concrete podium, with five floors of metal stud framing. The crozier used a steel podium level with four floors of wood construction above.

          However, these underlying structures don’t really impact the exterior look that is specifically complained of here. It doesn’t effect the ability to use certain material, etc.

          Instead, wood’s limitation is mainly with window spans and height. Although you will probably see that stockyard lofts and church and henley’s window spans are similar to Regus square and larger than many of the pure steel structures like the Andrew Johnson Building, the new Marriott hotel, Embassy Suites, etc.

          All this said, Flagship Kern’s is not very pretty because of reasons unrelated to its wood structure:

          The exterior doesn’t have dimension to it—it’s just a rectangle with nothing breaking up the straight walls. The roof design eliminates parapets and is instead sloped. And like a lot of buildings designed over the last 20 years, it employs a lot of hardy panels with a cosmopolitan design of horizontally repeating colors.

          These cost saving design choices and the use of certain exterior materials have little to do with the underlying structure.

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          1. Correction: Nothing breaking up the long straight facade except artificial columns every 30 feet and the repeating paint pattern on the hard panels.

  3. Alan have you heard if the city plans to add another stop light in this area? It’s gonna turn into a nightmare once everything gets going and those building are all full.

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  4. From an urban design perspective this complex totally misses the mark and the level of disappointment I feel at the City for allowing this to happen is hard to express. The buildings are, as said above, a suburbanization of the urban; cheap with just enough brick on the base to seem ‘city-like’ for the untrained eye and for those that don’t care.

    Aside: Can we please enact a material law for a certain mile radius of downtown, or offer incentives for better materials to be used? I am so flipping over seeing this cheap, bland, stucco on every new building above the first or second floor (don’t get me start on how half-a**ed the Courtyard Marriott downtown looks). Even those buildings that don’t use it, like the new apartments behind Shoney’s or the new one on Sevier, are still lacking in critical beauty and material interest that should set walkable, urban areas apart (though credit to City South for the rusted panels and black brick). Part of the reason people walk – or rather, a driver to get people to walk – is visual interest. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by allowing this basic level of non-design to exist. No offense to my engineer friends, but this looks like an engineer designed it. It’s not inspiring. It’s functional and … there. Knoxville deserves better.

    That said, the reason I am most upset with this development is not the bland ugliness of this building, it’s the lack of comprehension of *why* people, especially folks my age (I’m 30) want to live in or near downtown. We want to escape automobilism. We want to be, at worst, car-optional. In order to get more people living in and near downtown (and therefore spending more on the local economy and paying more in city and county taxes), we have to redesign our new buildings, especially in traditionally non-walkable areas like Chapmen Highway, to be urban.

    When this sign first went up with the rendering on it, I got so excited, because the placement of the sign and the angle of the rendering made it appear as if this massive new five story apartment was going to sit *on the sidewalk* of Chapman, right next to a KAT stop! It’s not like I didn’t expect them to provide zero parking, but my God, I thought they would have the decency to hide it. Now not only is there a massive new curb cut on the sidewalk there , but the fact that those residents would have to walk from all the way up that hill to catch a bus, and the fact that there is nothing of visual interest along the sidewalk there, means that they are less likely to ditch the car to bike, walk, or take the bus downtown. Especially with One Riverwalk (again, an average design at best) right around the corner treating the sidewalk the way it should be, for the most part, I am astonished that this site plan was allowed to go through.

    There aren’t many places we can expand our downtown’s footprint, but Chapman from the Henley bridge down to where Arby’s is has potential to be a nice dense enclave south of the river; a nice district of sidwalk facing, density that’s walkable and would encourage people to cross the river on something other than a car. There’s not just potential for it; there is a huge demand from people, especially those of us that plan to (and want to!) live in this city for the next three or four decades.

    Then crap like this happens and our future looks a little more like the same, drivable, suburban past. It makes me weary.

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    1. Dustin, thank you for so eloquently expressing your thoughts about the appearance and placement of these developments. They are beginning to line the river on both sides, and while they are providing “affordable” housing close to downtown, they are mind-numbingly dull in appearance and inexcusably damaging to both our vistas and our developing downtown lifestyle. It would be incredible if our community summoned the will to actually insist on something better. Your weariness over all this is totally understandable.

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      1. Blocking the views of the river and the ridges. The planning commission appears to agree to anything. While cheap housing is going in everywhere nothing has Bern done to actually improve Chapman highway. The so called urban wilderness is being packed full of people and cars and nothing more.

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    2. Yeah, I would love to go carless (I even did live carless here for a couple years, but that eventually became untenable when I got a job in the county), and this new development isn’t helping us in that direction. I understand why the city would be dragging its feet to fix existing infrastructure that isn’t pedestrian/multi-modal transit accessible, since that would be inconvenient and likely unpopular in the short term. But *new* developments? This is our chance to set the tone re: transit for the foreseeable future, and the city is simply making cosmetic changes without fixing the core issue that prioritizing car infrastructure like this marginalizes all other kinds of transit by spreading things out and making it less convenient to hop on a bus or bike. This is particularly disappointing coming from Kincannon, who has at least gestured toward being a transit-friendly mayor (though this would be far from the first time she’s disappointed me).

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  5. It’s encouraging, in a discouraging way, that these comments are unanimous in their dismay at this project, and the many others in Fort Sanders, on Cumberland, downtown, and in South Knoxville that look much like it. Cheap they are, which is too bad, but they could look better. The architects that get these jobs, typically from far away, do the bidding of the cheapskates that build them, and are also caught in the taught taboo against anything vaguely historicist, leaving them with very few tools and, it seems, few clues how to use them.

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  6. Always thought the charm of living in Knoxville to attend school was to rent a four bedroom house with friends for 800 a month shared at 200 each. Of course, you can’t go in and out of that kind of arrangement easily. Deposits against damage too also another issue to consider. But to rent these small spaces for the prices today and surely they are not sound proof. Making it harder to study. And so many folks jammed together means you have a really crammed in life in a formerly bucolic town. And at Manhattan prices.

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  7. Well John, you certainly lived in a nice piece of history down the road. I stay in Maplehurst here, seeing no temptations for my sort.😎

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  8. Keep commenting people! Appreciate the depth and breadth. Other news sources reporting on development pure boosterism, rarely includes alternate viewpoints, analysis, or insights into impacts of projects.

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