Mixed-use development — buildings that combine residential and commercial uses in a single structure or on a shared site — has been a stated planning priority for Asheville for years. The city’s Living Asheville Comprehensive Plan calls for more walkable, transit-supportive development. The housing shortage in Buncombe County is one of the most acute in Western North Carolina. And the commercial corridors where mixed-use makes the most urban sense — Haywood Road, Merrimon Avenue, Biltmore Avenue, the South Slope — are already dense with activity and established tenant demand.
What has historically made mixed-use difficult to build in Asheville is not vision. It’s the specific regulatory and financial barriers: parking requirements that forced projects to dedicate expensive square footage to cars, variances required for adaptive reuse, and City Council approval timelines that added months to pre-construction schedules. The 2025 UDO amendments addressed several of those barriers directly. Mixed-use development in Asheville is more viable now than it has been in a generation.
But the design complexity is real. A mixed-use architecture firm in Asheville that has navigated the acoustic, fire, MEP, and zoning requirements of mixed-occupancy buildings before is not the same as a firm that designs either residential or commercial buildings and has never resolved how the two interact in a single structure.
The foundation of any mixed-use building design is the IBC mixed-occupancy analysis. A building that combines residential (Group R-2) with retail (Group M), office (Group B), restaurant (Group A-2), or other commercial occupancies must comply with IBC Section 508, which establishes three approaches: separated occupancies, non-separated occupancies, and accessory occupancies.
Separated occupancies require fire-rated construction between each occupancy group — typically 2-hour rated floor-ceiling assemblies between residential above and commercial below, with rated corridor construction and fire doors at all openings between the two. Separated occupancies allow each use to be analyzed independently against its own allowable area and height limits.
Non-separated occupancies treat the most restrictive occupancy’s requirements as applying to the entire building — simpler to administer but often more costly because the stricter requirements extend throughout. For a building with residential over retail, non-separated treatment applies the more demanding requirements to the whole structure.
Accessory occupancies allow a small incidental use to be treated as part of the primary occupancy if it’s below 10% of the floor area — appropriate for a lobby coffee kiosk in an office building, for example, but rarely applicable to genuine mixed-use developments where the commercial component is a meaningful part of the program.
The right approach depends on the specific occupancy mix, the height and area of the building, the construction type, and the fire protection system — decisions that need to be made by a licensed architect with mixed-occupancy experience, not determined during permit review.
The single most common source of tenant complaints in mixed-use buildings — and the most expensive problem to fix after construction — is inadequate acoustic separation between the residential floors and the commercial spaces below. IBC requires sound transmission class (STC) 50 and impact insulation class (IIC) 45 for assemblies separating dwelling units from adjacent or below-grade occupancies. Those are minimum values, and in buildings with live music venues, restaurants with open kitchens, or fitness studios as the commercial tenant, minimum performance is often not enough.
Achieving STC 50 / IIC 45 in a wood-frame or light-gauge steel building requires a specific assembly: concrete topping slab or mass over the structural deck, resilient channels or sound isolation clips decoupling the ceiling below from the structure above, minimum 3.5 inches of mineral wool insulation in the cavity, and two layers of gypsum board on the ceiling. Each of these elements must be correctly specified and correctly installed — a single discontinuity in the resilient ceiling system can reduce STC performance by 10–15 points. These decisions are made in the construction documents and verified during construction administration. They cannot be meaningfully corrected with add-on acoustic panels after tenants move in.
Residential tenants and commercial customers should not share the same entrance, lobby, elevator, or stair — both for the resident experience and for security. Designing separate vertical circulation cores for residential and commercial in a building that may be 40 or 50 feet wide requires solving a real spatial puzzle, particularly when the ground floor must accommodate retail frontage, commercial lobby, residential lobby, and service access simultaneously. This is where mixed-use buildings get designed well or get designed generically, and the difference is visible in every conversation a future leasing agent has with a prospective residential tenant.
Mixed-use buildings require differentiated MEP risers — separate water, gas, electrical, and in many cases HVAC systems for residential and commercial portions of the building. This is partly a regulatory requirement (residential and commercial electrical systems have different metering and service entrance requirements) and partly a practical necessity (commercial tenants and residential tenants have incompatible hours of peak use, different ventilation requirements, and different tolerance for planned maintenance outages).
Coordinating two sets of MEP risers in a compact floor plan, through a structure shared by both uses, requires BIM-based coordination between the architect, structural engineer, and MEP engineers well before construction documents are issued. Field conflicts in MEP coordination are the most common source of construction cost overruns on mixed-use projects, and they’re preventable in the design phase.
Commercial tenants need loading access — for deliveries, equipment, and waste removal — that residential tenants find intrusive if it’s shared or adjacent to the residential entry. Trash enclosures for commercial uses, which generate significantly more waste than residential, need to be accessible to service vehicles without blocking the residential arrival sequence. These are site planning problems that need to be resolved in schematic design, not construction documents, when the site layout can still be adjusted without rebuilding the architectural logic of the building.
The Urban Place and Urban Village zones in Asheville’s UDO are designed specifically for mixed-use development — walkable, transit-supportive, densely programmed neighborhoods where ground-floor retail or commercial uses face the street and residential floors rise above. These zones are concentrated along Haywood Road in West Asheville, portions of Merrimon Avenue, and selected nodes across the city.
The 2025 UDO amendments created a direct size incentive in commercial zones: projects that include housing are eligible for increased building size allowances. On transit-supportive corridors in UP and UV zones, parking minimums have been eliminated — which changes the development economics of mixed-use infill fundamentally. A 4,000-square-foot lot on Haywood Road that previously couldn’t support a mixed-use building economically because of required parking can now be developed as a 3-story mixed-use structure with ground-floor commercial and apartments above without the parking burden.
Downtown Asheville’s CBD zone has always been mixed-use in practice — offices above retail, hotels above restaurants, residential above commercial. The Downtown Design Review Overlay adds a layer of architectural review by the Asheville Design Review Committee for projects that trigger Level II or Level III review, which means the exterior design of a mixed-use building in downtown Asheville will be evaluated by a nine-member joint committee before permits advance.
Mixed-use projects in the CBD also operate within Asheville’s Local Historic District in many blocks, adding Historic Resources Commission review for exterior changes. Navigating both the Design Review Committee and the HRC on a single project requires an architecture firm in Asheville that has appeared before both bodies before — familiarity with what each committee values and what generates friction is not something that can be acquired theoretically.
The RAD and South Slope have been Asheville’s most active mixed-use development zones in recent years. Former industrial buildings have been converted to live-work studios, ground-floor galleries with upper-floor residential, and brewery districts with associated retail and office components. Post-Helene, portions of both districts sustained flood damage — New Belgium’s brewing campus sustained equipment losses but limited structural damage, attributed in part to the restored wetland buffer on the site’s French Broad River frontage. Recovery investment in the RAD is ongoing, and the 2025 UDO amendments’ by-right conversion provisions specifically benefit the older commercial and industrial building stock in this area.
Biltmore Village’s Local Historic District presents the most constrained environment for mixed-use development in Asheville — exterior design is tightly governed by HRC standards, scale and materials are prescribed, and additions are reviewed carefully against contributing-structure guidelines. Within those constraints, Biltmore Village has sustained a stable mix of retail, restaurant, and service commercial uses at grade with residential and office above that functions well as a walkable neighborhood node.
Form & Function’s mixed-use and hospitality work includes the Kasa Downtown Asheville project at 42 Furman Avenue — a hospitality and residential mixed-use development that navigated the CBD/DDR overlay design review process — and Farmside Village in Alexander, a mixed-use development in a rural commercial context outside the city limits.
The argument for mixed-use development in Asheville is not primarily aesthetic. It’s financial and community-driven.
Walkable mixed-use development generates more tax revenue per acre than single-use commercial or residential development. It reduces vehicle miles traveled by locating services and housing in proximity to each other. It extends the active hours of a commercial district — a ground-floor restaurant draws dinner traffic that benefits the retail tenants on the same block. And in a city with Asheville’s housing shortage, every mixed-use building that adds residential units above commercial ground floors is expanding housing supply without consuming undeveloped land.
The community-level benefits align with Asheville’s Living Asheville Comprehensive Plan goals around housing affordability, walkability, and economic development. The 2025 UDO amendments that increase allowable building size for projects including housing are a direct translation of those goals into regulatory language that affects what gets built and where.
For developers considering mixed-use in Asheville, the practical calculation has shifted: with parking minimums eliminated on transit corridors, by-right adaptive reuse available without variance, and size bonuses for housing inclusion, the economics of mixed-use look better than they have at any point in the past decade. The design complexity hasn’t changed — acoustic separation, MEP coordination, and IBC Section 508 analysis are as demanding as they’ve always been — but the regulatory path to a permit has shortened.
IBC Section 508 governs buildings that combine two or more different occupancy groups — residential and retail, office and restaurant, and so on. It establishes three approaches to mixed-occupancy compliance: separated occupancies (rated construction between each use), non-separated occupancies (most restrictive use’s requirements apply throughout), and accessory occupancies (small incidental uses below 10% of floor area). Which approach is appropriate depends on your specific occupancy mix, building height and area, construction type, and fire protection system. Your architect determines this in the early design phase — it shapes every subsequent decision about the structure.
STC 50 / IIC 45 is achieved through a combination of mass, decoupling, and absorption in the floor-ceiling assembly between commercial and residential. A typical approach: concrete topping slab (for mass and impact isolation) over the structural deck, resilient channel or sound isolation clip ceiling system below (for decoupling), mineral wool insulation in the cavity (for absorption), and two layers of gypsum board on the ceiling. Every element must be correctly specified and correctly installed — a gap in the resilient ceiling system, or a hard connection between the ceiling framing and the structure, degrades STC performance significantly. This is a construction-phase verification issue as much as a design-phase specification issue.
Following the 2025 UDO amendments, by-right conversion of non-conforming commercial structures into mixed-use is available in many situations without a Board of Adjustment variance. The specific conditions — zone, existing non-conformity type, and proposed use mix — determine whether by-right conversion applies. Your architect should evaluate whether your specific project qualifies under the amended UDO before you assume a variance is required or that you’re clear of discretionary review entirely.
In most cases, yes. Duke Energy and Asheville Utilities require separate metering for residential and commercial tenants. Practically, this means separate electrical service entrances, separate water meters, and in most cases separate mechanical systems with separate controls for residential and commercial portions. Planning for separated utility systems in the schematic design phase — before the building section is fixed — is substantially easier and cheaper than resolving it during construction documents or, worse, during construction.
Mixed-use projects in the CBD/DDR overlay that trigger Level II or Level III review are subject to review by the Asheville Design Review Committee — a nine-member joint body of the Downtown Commission and the Asheville-Buncombe Riverfront Commission. The committee evaluates exterior design against the Downtown Design Guidelines: building massing, façade composition, materials, pedestrian experience at street level, and relationship to adjacent structures. Level II projects are reviewed administratively after TRC approval; Level III projects require City Council approval and the Design Review Committee’s input is part of that process. An architecture firm that has presented to this committee before knows what the committee values and how to prepare drawings that move through review efficiently.
Both zones are designed for walkable, mixed-use development. Urban Place (UP) is intended for higher-intensity, transit-supportive nodes — more building coverage, taller buildings, more active ground-floor programming. Urban Village (UV) is somewhat lower in intensity — still mixed-use and pedestrian-oriented, but more neighborhood-scale. The development standards — maximum building height, setbacks, ground-floor transparency requirements, and allowable uses — differ between the two zones. Your architect will identify which zone applies to your site and what development standards govern your project during the pre-design feasibility phase.
The 2025 UDO amendments raised the threshold for City Council review of residential projects that include affordable housing, which effectively reduces the regulatory burden for mixed-use projects with an affordable housing component. Asheville voters also approved an $80 million General Obligation Bond in November 2024, $20 million of which is designated for affordable housing — which may create financing partnership opportunities for qualifying mixed-use projects. Your architect and your development attorney should evaluate current program availability as part of the project feasibility analysis.
Form & Function Architecture has designed mixed-use and hospitality projects across Asheville and Western North Carolina, including projects in the CBD/DDR overlay, Biltmore Village, and suburban mixed-use contexts. The studio’s familiarity with IBC Section 508 analysis, acoustic separation design, Asheville’s design review processes, and the 2025 UDO amendments makes the engagement most valuable at the earliest stages of a project — before site selection is final and before development assumptions are baked into a pro forma.
Contact Form & Function at 828.575.2423 or info@ffarchitecture.com to schedule a consultation and discuss your mixed-use project.
