Krasny Oktyabr Factory Now Luxury Lofts

I'd pay double if it still smells like chocolate...

NY Times: The Krasny Oktyabr chocolate factory — named Red October in honor of the 1917 revolution — sits on an island in the Moscow River, across from the Kremlin’s turreted walls and gold-domed churches. In this oil-rich boomtown, where a square yard of downtown residential space sells routinely for $20,000 and sometimes for as much as $50,000, city planners and shareholders have decided that assembly lines next to the Kremlin no longer make sense. Now, Krasny Oktyabr, still rolling with the times, has become what every Russian company seems to want to be: a real estate developer.

Guta-Development, a real estate company that has acquired 75 percent of United Confectioners, is planning to make the Krasny Oktyabr lofts the centerpiece of a luxury construction project on Bolotny Island, the crescent of land that divides the river just south of the Kremlin. The developers are betting that Russians who are now at home in New York and London — the tiny group that, in Mr. Sarkisyan’s words, is “starting to have some taste” — have learned to value architecture that fits into its historical context and physical surroundings. They believe such buyers will pay millions of dollars to live in an urban, post-industrial streetscape with shops and sidewalks open to the public.

Way to sell out, Moscow.