When the risk-takers run out of risks

That house on Camilla Drive is finally off the market.

You may have seen it driving through South Charlotte – or in an Observer column I wrote late last year. It’s a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom, 6,977-square-foot palace near South Park, a home that has a little Charleston, a little Dilworth, and a lot of made-you-look going on.

It is, depending on your perspective, a spectacularly unusual house in a city where even the mansions are afflicted with sameness – or it’s a self-indulgent castle unwisely plunked in a neighborhood of smaller and plainer 1970s and 80s homes.

This much we know: 4823 Camilla Drive was on the market for more than eight years, longer than any home that Realtors across Charlotte could recall. Most told us they couldn’t think of another home that came close to hanging on the rack that long.

But now the house has occupants, who have signed a lease-purchase agreement allowing them to pay monthly rent that goes toward a purchase down the road, if they decide they want to own. So although the house is off the market, it technically has not been sold.

Which means it can torment its owner a little while longer.

“Nothing about this house,” says Eric Markel, “has been easy.”

You might remember Markel. He is the cocky president of a New York property management company who moved to Charlotte 13 years ago. He decided to build a few luxury homes here, none more extravagant than Camilla, but he chose to put that house in a neighborhood with properties worth a fifth of his home’s $2.45 million asking price.

It was a bold choice in a city where boldness usually paid off handsomely. But although people were dazzled by 4823 Camilla when it hit the market in 2003, no one bought it. Then, the recession arrived.

By the time he gave me a tour last December, he was understandably miffed. Along with touting the Brazilian hardwood on the deck and the custom cherry kitchen cabinets, he had some less-than-laudatory things to say about real estate agents and Charlotte in general.

“People don’t understand it,” he said of 4823 Camilla.

And: “They’re living in their own little Charlotte world.”

Charlotte, as you might imagine, had some suggestions on what Markel might do with those Brazilian planks.

Markel laughs now at the comments – his and other’s – although he still thinks Charlotte didn’t fully appreciate his creation. He does, however, have this to say about his homebuilding career: “It’s done.”

That would be a shame, because even if it comes bundled in brashness, Markel has a point about Camilla and Charlotte. When he built the house eight years ago, our city was beginning to do things out of the ordinary architecturally. Markel saw Camilla as the antithesis of the new luxury homes that populated Charlotte, the brick mansions with all the same bells and whistles that builders knew would attract buyers.

Charlotte has historically been much like those builders – checking off all the amenities that newcomers might like. We’re clean and pretty, and we have museums and pro teams, all of which is why people like Eric Markel came here and stayed.

That’s helped us thrive enough that something special was beginning: We were accommodating the uncommon, the independent businesses and funkier neighborhoods that give a city more texture and soul.

Then the economy squeezed most everything, including Markel, who’s doing fine now, in case you’re wondering. He’s made enough money elsewhere to survive the financial blows, but he says: “I can only imagine the bigger guys that really got hit.”

He believes prosperity will return here, and he’s already seeing glimpses of it in small ways – busier nights at restaurants and the mall. Bigger investment will come, he says, for all the reasons Charlotte thrived before.

But the risk-takers, the people who wanted to build one unusual house, open one unusual business? Those are the ones who have the least amount of resources – and the least amount of will – to risk it all again. In some ways, with our biggest businesses among our most uncertain, the smallest are the ones we need more than ever.

Maybe so, Eric Markel says, although it won’t be him. “My day has passed,” he says.

Then he pauses.

“But,” he says, “human beings have short memories.”