Cocheco Mills

Turning an old mill into apartments is a nice idea, but it has been poorly realized at Cocheco Mills in Dover. Its industrial chic design features—the polished concrete floors, the exposed pipes and bricks and beams—make for lovely pictures but irritating living conditions. Foot steps rumble and echo on those concrete floors like thunder—your foot steps, your neighbors’ foot steps (next door and especially above), those of passersby in the halls. (As you might imagine, they conduct and amplify... other sounds just as well.) And those exposed brick walls, which are exterior walls, are porous; remember that you’ll be living several stories off the ground, and that bats can fit through a hole the size of a nickel. Be sure to have a broom long enough to shoo them out of the corners of those high ceilings.

The Mill is a lovely old building, and probably a nice space in which to work. But the apartments are disappointing and overpriced. Read More