Camel Club & The Ashbrook: How Tyler Bromagen Brought Two Old Houses Back to Lif

Getting a 1906 house on East Main open as a private club took roughly four hours of public hearing, a year and a half of untangling restrictions nobody caught at closing, and about twelve business plans before one penciled.In this episode, Tyler Bromagen - a partner in Camel Club at 509 E. Main St. and the developer of The Ashbrook Hotel in Frankfort - joins us to walk through what adaptive reuse actually costs in time.We cover his first flip on Mockingbird Lane, the construction company that failed by chasing revenue instead of margin, and the point between roughly ten and thirty rental units where you can neither self-manage nor afford staff. Then the two historic projects: the Qualified Opportunity Zone fund and federal historic tax credits that made the Ashbrook financeable and added about eighteen months, the 500 photographs he printed and hand-labeled for the National Park Service because it wouldn’t take digital submissions, and the three months the project sat while historic review said not to touch the plaster and fire code said to sprinkle the building. He also explains how Camel Club’s programming - a four-city Kentucky Peach Week, an immersive film-dinner series - came out of staff emails rather than a plan.If you’ve walked past an empty historic building in Lexington and wondered why nothing is happening to it, this is a fairly complete answer.Bromagen is an owner of Camel Club and The Ashbrook Hotel and holds residential rental property in Lexington and Frankfort. This episode was recorded at Camel Club.Hosted by Ross Boggess