What Opened Inside Mooresville's 132-Year-Old Cotton Mill Powerhouse
June 4, 2026
June 4, 2026
The building on South Main Street doesn't announce itself. From the road, the Merino Mill complex reads as a long stretch of old industrial brick — the kind of thing you register once and stop noticing. Most people who have lived in Mooresville for years have driven past it without turning in.
Walk through the entrance, and the scale changes. The complex covers more than one million square feet. On a weekend morning, the parking lot fills before 9 a.m. The campus draws more than 110,000 visitors per month.
Most of them aren't there for the same reason twice.
In 2008, a local entrepreneur named Michal Bay purchased the former Burlington Industries plant on South Main Street — a sprawling textile complex that had sat largely dormant for years. Before Burlington, it had been the Moor Turkish Towel Company's mill. Before that, the Mooresville Cotton Mills. The building was 132 years old when Bay bought it.
He didn't flatten it. Over the next 15-plus years, he restored it tenant by tenant and building by building: corporate offices for international companies including DEHN, Inc. and Greenworks Tools, retail, a co-working center, an event hall, and restaurants. More than 50 tenants now call the complex home.
The most recent chapter required three years on its own. The original cotton mill powerhouse — a red brick structure at 518 S. Church Street, with 52-foot ceilings, tall arched windows, and hand-laid floors — had been sitting empty inside the complex. Bay said he could have knocked it down and built something four times bigger.
He didn't.
"It is a piece of an American heritage, and the people of Mooresville deserve to keep this building." — Michal Bay
That building is now Florence Wine & Beer Garden.
Florence opened in a soft launch in fall 2025, with a grand opening on October 7. The space runs 12,000 square feet, and the original 52-foot ceiling is the first thing you see when you walk in. Bay spent almost three years on the renovation without touching the structure: the brick is freshly cleaned, the archways are intact, and the new kitchen and long bar sit inside the shell exactly as it stood when it was generating power for the mill.
The menu is Italian, shaped in part by Bay's own travel: fresh pastas, lasagna, meatballs, fish, beef, and chicken. Desserts run to cannoli, tiramisu, limoncello mascarpone cake, hot honey peach cheesecake, and several chocolate specialties. Bay said his personal favorite is a steak cooked with Italian herbs, so tender it's served with a spoon rather than a knife. Beer and wine are fully licensed.
Prices are deliberate. Bay built Florence so that eating inside a room with 52-foot ceilings and century-old brick wouldn't feel out of reach. The campus has always worked that way: spaces that exceed expectations, food that doesn't price people out.
The menu is still finding its final form. Like the other Merino Mill restaurants, Florence is designed to take shape through customer feedback in its first year. The bones, though, are finished.
Florence arrives alongside three restaurants that have been building their own followings for years.
Barcelona earned a ranking as the best burger in North Carolina from MSN in 2021 and has been the highest-traffic restaurant on campus since. It operates with a full bar, a beer garden, and the same no-gimmick approach Bay applies across the mill: strong ingredients, clean execution, nothing to hide behind. On a Saturday afternoon, there is often a wait.
Aliño is award-winning, wood-fired, and built around the same principle as Barcelona: simple food done well. It anchors the Saturday morning events alongside Defined Coffee, which means the campus starts pulling traffic before most restaurants in Mooresville have unlocked their doors.
Picasso is the most recent addition before Florence, opening to a formal proclamation from the Town of Mooresville recognizing the campus's overall impact on the South Main corridor. Its Mediterranean format rounds out a campus that can now handle a full table with different preferences without sending anyone elsewhere.
The antique mall spans approximately 430 vendors, making it the largest in the Carolinas. It draws its own considerable traffic and feeds the restaurants in both directions: people come for the gallery and stay for lunch, or start with dinner and end up browsing. That loop is part of why monthly visitor counts sit above 110,000.
LKN Cars & Coffee holds its monthly events on the Merino Mill campus on Saturday mornings, with Defined Coffee and Aliño Pizzeria as the on-site anchors. It pulls collectors and casual enthusiasts both, and it reliably extends a quick visit into a two-hour stay without anyone quite meaning it to.
The event hall operates separately from the restaurants: exposed nineteenth-century brick, high ceilings, acoustics suited to weddings, corporate gatherings, and private events. It has its own draw that has nothing to do with lunch.
An evening at Florence has a shape that a freestanding restaurant rarely offers. Browse the antique gallery first, walk the complex, sit down for pasta under 52-foot ceilings, stay for dessert and another glass of wine. The campus rewards time. A dinner at Barcelona follows the same logic in a different register. You come for one thing and find that the place has more of itself than you expected.
Mooresville's hospitality conversation has been waterfront for years, and the waterfront has earned that. Vitale Lakeside opened this spring at the former Queens Landing site on River Highway — a more-than-$3-million renovation of a location that had been closed since 2023, with a family-friendly ground floor restaurant and Bonnie & Clyde's Lounge on the upper level with floor-to-ceiling lake views. That is a real addition to the lake scene.
But South Main is doing something the waterfront can't: it's building depth. Merino Mill is the only place in the lake area where one person spent more than 15 years restoring a historic industrial campus from the inside out, and where the restaurants that resulted came second to the spaces they inhabit.
Florence's opening in the powerhouse makes the campus feel complete in a way it hasn't before. Four restaurants, an antique mall, an event hall with nineteenth-century bones, a recurring Saturday morning market, and more than 110,000 visitors a month. That's not a quirky local curiosity. That's a district.
Mooresville shows you more than the lake version of itself, if you know where to look. If you want to understand what daily life here actually looks like — the neighborhoods, what's been built, what's still arriving — Nicole Leininger has been following this market closely for years. Let's connect when you're ready.
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