Ithacating in Cornell Heights

Okay, I’ll be completely honest – I don’t know what’s going in here. I don’t know what the mix of uses is, or many residential units there are. Here’s what I do know.

206 Taughannock was until earlier this year the site of the Unfinished Furniture Store (otherwise called the “Real Wood Furniture Store“) owned and operated by the Zaharis family. From the county records, the building itself is a 9,156 sq ft structure originally used for retail and warehouse space and dated to sometime in the 1970s. The store closed in April when its owners retired, and a building permit shown in a ground-floor window was issued in July to the Zaharises. I ran this past IB’s Jason on Twitter, and his guess was about as good as mine; residential units on top and maybe some of the bottom, with a reduced retail space. Photos of the store before renovation can be seen here at Ithaca Builds – the Lehigh Valley House next door is being renovated by its owner (Tim Ciaschi) into 6 condos and ground-floor commercial space. With the 323 Taughannock project approved just up the road, Inlet Island has been seeing increased interest from both current owners and prospective developers. Perhaps the biggest loss is the removal of a rather attractive mural from the front of the structure.

The work itself looks like a complete gutting of the original two-story building, with new windows punched into the walls and sedate exterior (fiber cement?) siding attached to the more complete exterior sections.

I reached out to the owners but have yet to hear a reply; if anyone has some info to share, feel free to reply to this post or send an email. These projects are the most fun for me, because they go without fanfare, but are just as important as any other project of equal size; they lie in wait for discovery and publication.