New rooftop restaurant pitched for Five Points atop long-vacant office building
Five Points could be getting a new rooftop restaurant as developers plan to renovate a long-vacant office building on Columbia’s Devine Street.
Builders hope to add a seventh floor to the property at 2221 Devine St., to create the space for the restaurant. The plans are part of a larger renovation of the building that has sat empty for more than half a decade.
The city in 2025 approved selling the empty office building to Southeastern Technology Centers, LLC, for $2 million. That sale was conditioned on the building offering space for technology companies, which city and state officials have said they want to see more of in South Carolina and Columbia. The building sale officially went through April 2, 2026, according to county property records.
As part of the rehabilitation of the property, developers hope to add a partial seventh floor for the rooftop restaurant. The added floor would bring the building’s height to 88 feet and six inches — taller than the 75-foot height limit for the area.
Builders will first need city permission to exceed that height limit before the plans can move forward. Columbia’s Board of Zoning Appeals will consider the request at a meeting May 7.
Columbia took a loss on the building sale, having bought the property for $3.8 million from the state government in 2019. At the time, city leaders envisioned the site becoming a hotel, but those visions never materialized.
The city tried to unload the building in 2021 for $4.5 million to developer Latitude 32 LLC, which planned to build up to 250 new townhouses on the site, but those plans also fell through.
With the past development attempts failing, the six-story, nearly 91,000-square-foot office building has been empty since Columbia bought it. The city has opened the building’s parking lot for free parking, but otherwise it has gone unused.
The building is located on the eastern edge of Five Points. At the other end of the popular entertainment district, another tall building is in the works.
Plans are moving forward for an 8-story, 105-foot tall hotel and parking garage at 705 Saluda Ave. We Love Five Points, LLC, overseen by Gunnar Burts, alongside Webb Yongue with Capstone Property Group are planning to redevelop the former Wells Fargo bank branch into a hotel that Five Points leaders say has been a long time coming.
That hotel project earlier this year became the first development to be granted a height variance since the city adopted the Five Points Design Guidelines in 2006, according to the city’s zoning department.
