Mansfield Stopped Asking For A Restaurant At The Old Fire Station. It's Getting One Anyway.

The brick building at 291 North Main Street went up in 1930. It stopped being a fire station in February 2019, after a fire broke out inside it. It now has an open kitchen on the ground floor, a function room upstairs, and a rooftop deck with its own bar. The owners also plan to restore the old fire pole. In early October, What Now Boston reported that construction was nearly finished and that Butter Dream Bakery & Wine Bar was targeting a mid-November 2026 opening.

Six years ago, the town asked for nearly this exact business and got no bids at all. The town spent the next year deciding what it could give up and what it would keep.

The First Sale Asked For A Bakery And Drew No Proposals

Mansfield had planned to close the North Main Street station anyway. The new $22 million public safety building on Route 106 was due to open in the summer of 2019. Police and fire moved in that August, and the fire department announced the building's official opening on Monday, Aug. 12, according to Wicked Local. That November, the Special Town Meeting motions packet included a proposal to let the Select Board declare the property surplus and sell it. The lot is 0.35 acres, listed as Assessors Map 24 Lot 272.

Keeping the building for town use was never a cheap option. As The Enterprise reported, a 2010 study estimated that fixing some existing problems would cost more than $1 million. Even that work would not have made the building fully functional, up to current standards, or ADA compliant. Heating and electrical upgrades were among the needs.

A lot of local groups wanted the building saved. In 2019, a joint letter urged its preservation. It was signed by the Mansfield Local Cultural Council, the Mansfield Historical Commission, the Natural Resources Trust, the Mansfield Planning Board and the Mansfield Historical Society. Members of the Industrial Development Commission, the Mansfield Downtown Business Association, the National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture and Keep Mansfield Beautiful also joined. The letter pointed to communities that had turned old fire stations into restaurants, performance centers and retail stores.

The Select Board issued a request for proposals in March 2020 and later extended it to May. The RFP said the ideal proposal would put a restaurant, bakery, brew pub or coffee shop on the ground floor, possibly with residential use upstairs. It set a minimum price of $420,000 and included a façade restriction to protect the exterior. It went out just as the pandemic was shutting down businesses across Massachusetts. Nobody submitted a proposal.

What The Town Gave Up, And What It Held

The second attempt was a negotiation with the market. Michael Ahern, the town's operations manager for public buildings, told the board that people who had picked up the RFP described "a downturn or lack of interest in commercial real estate right now, especially in restaurants and things of that nature," The Enterprise reported.

Ahern proposed three changes, and the board accepted two of them:

1. Drop the restaurant preference. The RFP would no longer call a restaurant, brew pub, bakery or similar business the most "advantageous" proposal. The board agreed.
2. Turn the price floor into an estimate. The $420,000 minimum would become an "estimated price," which opened the door to lower bids. The board agreed.
3. Remove the façade restriction. Some potential developers had objected to it. The board refused to act without first asking the public.

"We promised the taxpayers they would have input," select board member Jess Aptowitz said, according to The Enterprise. "We heard, 'keep the façade.'" Michael Trowbridge, another board member, brought up the town next door: "Foxboro took almost five years," he said, to find a developer for its own former fire station. "I'm most concerned with getting the best project for the center of town than just getting this back on the tax rolls." Chairperson Frank DelVecchio put it this way: "There's no shame in trying again and trying again until we get it right."

In 2021, the Select Board chose a proposal from Peter Kuplast, a Mansfield resident and restaurateur, to turn the building into a café, bakery, restaurant and wine bar. The town had stopped asking for a restaurant, and the winning proposal was a restaurant anyway.

The Numbers Behind A $300,000 Fire Station

Kuplast bought the property for $300,000 and has put $3.7 million into renovations, according to The Sun Chronicle, as cited by What Now Boston. Here is how those figures compare with the earlier ones.

The town ended up $120,000 below its original floor, and that gap is small next to what the building needed. The renovation figure is more than twelve times the purchase price. It also goes far past the 2010 repair estimate, which never promised a fully usable building. Read this way, the price cut was the town recognizing that most of the cost of reusing the station would fall on whoever bought it. The Sun Chronicle also quoted the owners' attorney, Ken Rice of Launie and Marino in Westwood, who estimated about 40 new jobs over two staggered shifts.

"Thank you for choosing Mansfield and reinvesting in this community," Town Manager Mallory Aronstein told Kuplast, according to The Sun Chronicle.

What Is Opening Inside

Behind the 1930 brick, the space follows the plan the first RFP described, at a larger scale. What Now Boston reports these details:

• Morning: three to five varieties of bread a day made with organic flour, plus croissants, danishes, cinnamon rolls and breakfast sandwiches on house bread.
• Midday: soups and salads.
• Evening: a bistro-style wine bar with tapas-style small plates, cocktails and champagne.
• Ground floor: an open kitchen and room for about 50 to 60 guests.
• Upstairs: a function space for 70 to 80 guests, available for birthday parties, baby showers and bridal showers.
• Outside: a seasonal front patio with about 30 seats and a rooftop deck with its own bar. Both indoor floors also have bars.

The proposed weekday hours are breakfast and bakery from 6 to 11 a.m., lunch from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and small plates and wine from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. Weekend service would start at 7 a.m., with Sunday alcohol service beginning at 10 a.m. for brunch.

The family already has a track record downtown. Phyllis Kuplast, Peter's daughter, will manage Butter Dream. She has managed the family's Cibo Matto Caffe on Chauncy Street for 13 years, and both Cibo Matto and Corfinio in Easton will stay open. "It's a great community space, and we're going to honor that," she told What Now Boston.

The Opening Date Has Already Moved Once

The Sun Chronicle's earlier report said the Select Board had approved an annual all-alcohol common victualler license and an early Sunday sales license. At that point, the remaining steps were finishing construction and getting a license from the state Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission. The target then was a soft opening in late September, with full operation in early October. By Oct. 9, the target had moved to mid-November. Butter Dream's own site still says only "coming 2026." Treat the mid-November date as a goal, not a promise.

A project this size slipping a few weeks is not unusual, and it took about five years to get here. "This is long anticipated, I'm sure for you as well as everyone else in town," select board member Brendan Roche told Kuplast, according to The Sun Chronicle.

The next fixed date downtown is the town's Tree Lighting Ceremony at South Common, 6 Park Row, at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 29. If the mid-November target holds, that weekend could be the first chance to see the station lit up on a late-November evening. For more of the town past North Main Street, see our notes on Mansfield's two trail systems at Great Woods and our Mansfield neighborhood overview.

At Talib Hussain Realty Group, we look at older Mansfield property the way the town had to look at this station, starting with renovation cost, timing and restrictions, whether you own an older home near the center of town or are thinking about one. If you'd like to talk through what a building like that is really worth to you, Let's Connect.