Mulberry Place

Listings update live from CVRMLS · Profile last reviewed July 2026

Mulberry Place sits at 2620 Stuart Avenue, on the corner of Stuart and Mulberry in the western Fan. It is not an apartment conversion (like 1630 Monument, or Windsor Court, or Ambrata, or Tuckahoe, or Prestwould, or one of the many other former apartment buildings in the Fan or Museum Districts), and it should not be shopped like one. The units are on the larger side, roughly 2,000 square feet, built on a single level, and the building has an elevator and gated private parking. When it came to market in January 2004 the asking prices approached $500K — among the highest condominium prices in Richmond at the time. The closest comparison in the city is 1400 Grove.

History

The building was purpose-built in 1914 as the second home of the Richmond Home for Ladies, an elderly care institution founded in 1883 by a group of local physicians and clergymen who wanted a humane alternative to the almshouse for elderly women from area Methodist and Presbyterian churches. The original home at 515 North Seventh Street filled to capacity by 1913, and the board chose the corner of Stuart Avenue and Mulberry Street for its replacement. It served in that role for 87 years, from 1914 until 2001, and passed through various forms and uses before the developers acquired it in the early 2000s. The governance is the part worth knowing. From 1883 to 1987 the home ran under two boards — a Men’s Board of Directors controlling business and finances, and a Board of Lady Managers running daily operations. The Lady Managers served without pay, but the by-laws demanded what amounted to a full-time job: regular meetings, committee service, visiting residents, attending funerals. Surviving minutes at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture show them repeatedly pressing the Men’s Board for more control over policy and funding, on the grounds that they were the ones who actually knew the residents. The museum describes them as textbook Progressive-Era “New Women” — using social reform to build a role for themselves outside the home. The institution never closed. It moved out of 2620 Stuart in 2001 and operates today as Covenant Woods.

Design & units

Converted in 2003–04, and deliberately designed not to feel like a converted apartment building. Where a typical Fan tenement renovation carves units off a stair hall, Mulberry Place has proper central corridors and a club room landing area you arrive into — a sequence that comes from the building’s institutional origins and gives it a considerably more formal feel than its neighbors. The big front porch and oversized windows reinforce it. Units run roughly six per floor across three floors, lettered A through F, plus a lower-level unit — approximately eighteen in total. Sizes are 2,076 to 2,111 square feet, two and three bedrooms, all on a single level. The conversion kept the original Southern Yellow heart-of-pine floors, high ceilings and large windows, and added cherry cabinetry, two fireplaces in some units, and private master suites. Two features genuinely separate this building from the rest of the Fan’s condominium stock: gated private parking, and an elevator. The elevator in particular matters — single-level living on an upper floor with no stairs to climb is close to unavailable elsewhere in the Fan, and it makes this building work for buyers that most of the neighborhood simply cannot serve.

Neighborhood

The western Fan, at Stuart and Mulberry, a block off Robinson. There is a Starbucks literally next door, the Robinson Street restaurant corridor is a short walk, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is two to three blocks away with the Virginia Museum of History & Culture just beyond it. It is one of the most walkable and consistently in-demand stretches of the city. A small coincidence worth knowing: the Richmond Home for Ladies archive — the minutes, correspondence and photographs documenting this building’s first 87 years — is held at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, a few blocks from the building it describes.

What sets it apart

The useful way to place this building: it is much closer to 1400 Grove than to 1630 Monument. Almost every Fan condominium is a converted single-family house or a converted apartment building, and both types inherit a residential floor plan. Mulberry Place was purpose-built as an institution, which is why the floor plates are large enough to yield 2,000-square-foot single-level units, why it could support central corridors and a club room, and why an elevator was feasible. None of that can be manufactured after the fact — it comes from the original 1914 program.

See it in context

Open full 3D view in Google Maps → · Photorealistic 3D Tiles via Google Maps Platform · coords from MLS-median (30 listings).

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