Anyone who drives Mill Street regularly has a joke by now about the scaffolding on the southwest corner at Stafford. It went up before some Plymouth kids started kindergarten, and it's still there. The building underneath it, the old H.C. Laack Block, was supposed to reopen as the Henry Christopher Hotel by spring 2026. Then fall 2026. The most recent word from the Plymouth Review pushes it to mid or late 2027.
That sounds like a project in trouble. It isn't. The reason this corner keeps missing its own deadlines is the same reason a handful of smaller decisions around downtown this year look the way they do, and once you see the pattern, the wait makes a lot more sense.
What's Actually Going Up Inside the Laack Block
The building at Mill and Stafford has been a hotel in one form or another since 1889, when Henry Christopher Laack built it after making his money running his father's hardware store in town. It most recently operated as the 52 Stafford Hotel until that business closed in the winter of 2023. The Gentine family, the same family behind Sargento, bought the property in 2024 for roughly $1.63 million and set out to restore it rather than tear it down and start over. City leaders and local reporting have called it the largest private investment in the Plymouth Historic District's history.
The plan, once finished, is a boutique hotel that first went out publicly as 35 rooms, though the most recent construction updates from the Plymouth Review put the current count at 34. The ground floor of the original Laack Hotel is being built out as event space, with a banquet room planned to seat around 120 people for weddings and family reunions, plus a pre-event area for cocktail hours. A restaurant named The Pharmacy will seat up to 90, with another 30 seats at the bar. On the roof, a bar called The Mullet will look out over the Mullet River and Stayer Park, Plymouth's first rooftop bar of any kind.
Lee Gentine, one of the family members leading the project, has framed the whole thing as an act of patience rather than speed. As he put it to the Plymouth Review, the goal is "to build a bridge to the past, while creating something new for the community and future generations."
Why the Timeline Keeps Moving
The first public version of this project, announced in late 2024, had construction wrapping by spring 2026. By the middle of 2025, that had already slipped to fall 2026, with Lee Gentine telling the Review the preservation work was "on track" for that new date. It has since slipped again. The most recent update attributes the delay to a mix of engineering challenges, design changes, and the historic reviews required for a building of this age and designation, and now points to a mid-to-late 2027 opening.
That kind of slippage would be a warning sign on a lot of projects. Here it reads differently, partly because of who keeps showing up around it. Columbia Hospitality, a Seattle-based operator, was brought on late in 2025 specifically to manage the hotel and its restaurant and bar once it opens, the kind of hire a project makes when it's scaling up its ambitions, not scrambling to finish. The head architect on the restoration, Jennifer Lehrke, grew up in Plymouth and has described the work as detective work, matching new construction back to details from the 1890s rather than approximating them. Every account of the delay points the same direction: more of the original building is worth saving than anyone expected, and the family keeps choosing to save it instead of moving faster.
The Same Pattern Shows Up Everywhere Else Downtown This Year
Once you notice it at the Laack Block, it's hard not to notice it elsewhere on Mill Street.
Devour, the fast-casual restaurant known for its carved sandwiches and in-house pastries, waited more than three years running its original Plymouth location before opening a second spot. When it finally expanded this past spring, it didn't pick a new market. It moved seven minutes down the road to Elkhart Lake, into the same building as the existing Harry's Pizza e Vino, and kept the same food.
Plymouth Brewing Company, the craft brewery at 222 E. Mill Street, didn't open a second taproom or expand its footprint this year. It added one thing: a Wednesday shift on a schedule that used to skip the day entirely.
The Cheese Capital Wine Walk marked its 10th year this past August. Rather than doubling in size for the milestone, organizers grew it by exactly two stops, from 14 downtown businesses a few years back to 16 this year, still walkable across six blocks of Mill Street in an evening.
Even the Sartori Big Cheese Drop, Plymouth's answer to the ball drop on New Year's Eve, made a small adjustment rather than a big one. Instead of the traditional midnight drop, organizers moved it to 10 p.m. one recent year specifically so more families with younger kids could be there for it.
None of these are the same decision. But they share a shape. Nobody in downtown Plymouth is chasing the fastest possible version of anything this year. They're making the version that holds up.
What This Means If You're Walking Past This Fall
Practically, the scaffolding at Mill and Stafford isn't coming down soon, so plan around it rather than for it. The rest of downtown's fall rhythm is unaffected. The Riverwalk Path behind Stayer Park hosts the Pumpkin Walk on Friday, October 30, from 5 to 7 p.m., free for all ages, the same free community tradition that's brought carved pumpkins, hot chocolate, and a Fire Department marshmallow roast to that stretch of river in past years. If you want something to eat on the way, The Cheese Counter and Dairy Heritage Center at 133 E. Mill Street is still open daily for grilled cheese, paninis, and Kelley's Country Creamery ice cream, a fixture that predates any of this construction and isn't going anywhere while it continues.
Why the Slow Timeline Actually Tells You Something Useful
The easy read on a missed deadline is that something's wrong. The more accurate read, at least on this corner of Plymouth, is that the people making the decisions keep finding reasons to slow down rather than speed up, and every other business making news downtown this year has made a version of the same call. That's not a story about one building falling behind schedule. It's a description of how this particular downtown tends to move, in small deliberate steps rather than sudden ones, and it's worth knowing if you're the kind of person who notices what's happening on the corner you drive past every day.
If you already call Plymouth home and you're curious what that steady pace of change downtown means for what your own property is worth, or you know someone thinking about a move into the Cheese Capital, Craig Kasten at Wisconsin Real Estate Solutions is a straightforward call away for a free home valuation and consultation.
