GEORGES MILLS — Nearly 20 people were displaced after an apartment building on Prospect Hill Road went up in flames last January. Now the property owner is poised to rebuild.

At their Tuesday meeting, the Zoning Board of Adjustment approved new construction on the site of the former Lake Sunapee Manor, a three-story residential building in Georges Mills, an unincorporated village of Sunapee, located at 27 Prospect Hill Road, off Route 11.

“I bought that building a few months before the fire,” said Rebert Parpinelli, who owns Merrimack, N.H.-based Growth Cap Management, LLC, which bought the building for $1.3 million. “I was really sad.”

The site is also home to a barn that is a former music venue which is credited for birthing the rock band Aerosmith. The future of that structure, which survived the fire, remains uncertain.

To replace the 14-unit apartment building that was destroyed in last year’s blaze, the owner plans to build one four-unit and two five-unit buildings on the 2.65- acre lot. Each of the 14 units are planned to contain three-bedrooms.

“I’m glad to see that they’re rebuilding and putting multi-family b ack in there,” board chair Jeff Claus said. “We definitely need that.”

Last January’s fire displaced 19 adults, according to the Sunapee welfare office. The cause of the fire was undetermined, Sunapee Assistant Fire Chief Dana Ramspott said in a recent phone interv iew.

“As far as I know, everyone who was displaced has found a place, whether it was with family, friends or their own places,” Welfare Director Laura Trow said.

Built in the 1880s, Lake Sunapee Manor once served as a boarding house with up to 40 rooms. The attached barn to the Manor, has its own history.

Steven Tyler, Aerosmith’s lead singer, spent his summers in Sunapee growing up. In 1969, Tyler attended a show at the barn and saw Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry and bassist Tom Hamilton perform with their band, Jam Band. Soon after, the trio relocated to Boston to form Aerosmith.

The project as proposed, requires the barn to be torn down, but Wayne McCutcheon, a Claremont-based land surveyor who’s working on the project, said he is “running a personal campaign to save the barn.”

McCutcheon’s vision, which Parpinelli has agreed to, is to disassemble the barn, tag it, and reassemble it somewhere else in Sunapee. Although he would not say the exact spot he has in mind for the structure, he said it’s town owned land with “the perfect grading.”

Parpinelli is unsure whether he will rent or sell the units yet. If selling, he believes he can ask for $550,000 each. He plans to charge no less than $2,500 per month for each unit if he chooses to rent.

“That’s the low end, but I don’t want to charge too much,” he said.

For a three-bedroom apartment, the median rent in Sullivan County is $1,857, Etienne LaFond, a New Hampshire Housing spokesperson, said.

Before the fire, rent was set at around $1,500 a month for the one-bedroom units and around $1,800 a month for the two-bedroom units, Parpinelli said.

The median price for a two-bedroom apartment in Sullivan County is $1,431, according to New Hampshire Housing’s 2024 Residential Rental Cost Survey Report which came out last August.

Growth Cap Management also owns 14 apartment units on 22 Maple Street in West Lebanon.

In 2022, after Growth Cap Management purchased the property, the tenants of the units received eviction notices to allow for renovations.

After painting the exterior building, adding laundry facilities, bringing the residences up to safety codes, installing a wheelchair ramp, and adding lighting outside the building, the rents were increased from $900 to $1,000 for a one-bedroom apartment to about $1,400 or $1,500.

Parpinelli said he gets around $2,000 a month for the two-bedroom units, about the same as the median cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Grafton County which is $2,027, according to the August report.

The Sunapee project now needs approval from the Sunapee Planning Board before it can begin construction. Parpinelli plans to bring the project to the next board meeting on Feb. 13.

“If we get that approval then we can rock and roll,” Parpinelli said. He hopes to start construction on the first five-unit building as early as this spring.

Emma Roth-Wells can be reached at erothwells@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.