The one-story brick building sits opposite the HandCraft Building on Leigh Street. (Mike Platania photo)
One of the more active families in Scott’s Addition real estate has snatched up another property in the neighborhood, albeit a small one.
The Nichols brothers – Jay, Keith and Jeff, who own and run industrial laundry company HandCraft – recently purchased 3305 W. Leigh St. for $1.2 million, city records show.
The property consists of a 3,500-square-foot office building on a 0.2-acre plot. It sits across the street from the HandCraft building, the former headquarters of the Nichols family’s dry cleaning business that they redeveloped into a mixed-use hub in the late 2010s.
Jay Nichols said that he’s working on plans for their newly acquired Leigh Street property but that he couldn’t yet share details. The family doesn’t appear to own any other properties on that block, according to city records.
The sale closed Aug. 5 and came in just below the parcel’s most recent assessed value of $1.3 million.
The building was formerly the office for ad firm MBM Marketing, whose CEO Maggi Beckstoffer had owned the building with her husband since the late 1990s when they bought it for $150,000.
Beckstoffer said she shuttered MBM last year.
Though the Nicholses’ signature property in Scott’s Addition is the redeveloped HandCraft building, they’ve remained busy picking up real estate throughout the neighborhood in recent years.
In 2021 and 2022 they bought a pair of flex industrial buildings at 1708 and 1710 MacTavish Ave. for a combined $2.6 million, and recently lined up an electric tuk-tuk dealership as a tenant in the latter building. The Nicholses also gradually acquired the entire city block at 3200 W. Moore St. and went on to sell it to a pair of out-of-town developers who are building a massive mixed-use building on the site. Outside of Scott’s Addition, the Nicholses also have a modern office building in the pipeline that would rise in the Libbie-Patterson area.
Adjacent to 3305 W. Leigh St. is another former flex industrial building that was recently converted into the headquarters for local interior design firm JTW Design.