Lonely at the top.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: The Carillon Building in Charlotte, North Carolina - Real Estate

As they prepared to demolish the old Hotel Charlotte in 1988, David Copperfield was inside, waiting for the explosion that would bring tons of rubble down on his head.

Before the dust settled, the famous escape artist emerged unscathed, a moment of triumph captured by his film crew for a future TV special. Unknown to him, a newspaper photographer had caught him slipping out the back of the hotel moments before the dynamite blew.

But to most, his survival was a mystery, one surpassed only by the $100 million Carillon building, rising on the West Trade Street site. Why, in the current real-estate market, would anybody want to build an office building downtown without an anchor tenant?

"No one thought Charlotte needed another office building when they announced their plans," says Charles Conner, managing director of Bowles Hollowell Conner & Co., the investment-banking firm that signed the first lease in Carillon. "When they bought the land, no one believed it would be built. When they dug the hole, nobody believed they'd get it out of the ground. When they'd finished one floor, people thought they'd halt construction. And now that they've topped off the site, people don't believe they can fill it."

At the end of 1990, Conner's firm was not just the first signed tenant, it was the only one. And with real-estate values plummeting and 1.4 million square feet of other new Class A space coming on the market, it's no wonder that Carillon still has people scratching their heads. As Atlanta developer Tom Cousins has said, This is no time for speculative building, except for drunks and fools."

Carillon is a 470,000-square-foot speculative building. But it's not one built by an overstretched developer financed by a teetering S&L. Instead, it's a testimony to the virtues of patient money, in this case, decades of patience by a European family that has long viewed North Carolina as a land of promise.

Carillon, which is scheduled to open in june, is the first office tower built by Hesta AG, a Swiss holding company that sells more than $1 billion a year of air filters, underwear, textile machinery and other goods in 55 countries. Since the 1940s, Charlotte has been the heart of its U.S. operations. Its Luwa, Zellweger Uster and Pneumafil subsidiaries employ more than 800 here.

Hesta is controlled by the Bechtler family, distant descendants of Christopher Bechtler, who left Germany in 1831 to mint gold coins in Rutherford County. Another branch of the...