In early 2016, when Common House Charlottesville was under construction at 206 W. Market St., its roof caved in. Snow dumped by a massive winter storm buckled the structure, threatening to pull down the interior walls. Co-founders Josh Rogers, Derek Sieg, and Ben Pfinsgraff had to supervise a painstaking rebuild prior to the club’s 2017 grand opening.
On April 15, Common House imploded again.
“I am writing to share the difficult news that Common House will close, effective Thursday, April 16th, 2026, due to a landlord dispute,” CEO Ben Wood wrote in an email to members. Wood said the business’s new owners had worked for months to reach an agreement with several of the founders, who still own the building. “Regrettably, the landlord (Ben Pfinsgraff, Martin Pfinsgraff Jnr and Derek Sieg) has rejected all proposals,” Wood wrote.
In a statement shared by Sieg, the landlords disputed Wood’s account. “In mid-2025, Common House fell behind on several consecutive rent payments,” they wrote. “Despite this, and in an effort to support their continued operations, Biarritz [the LLC that legally owns the building] worked in good faith with Common House to execute a lease amendment and forbearance agreement in August 2025.”
The landlords say they’d agreed to let Common House occupy the space through 2026 at a reduced rate while the company worked through its challenges. But they say Common House failed to meet its obligations and pay rent this month, prompting the property owners to terminate its lease.
Wood’s message said the company will “pursue all legal strategic avenues to resolve this situation.” When asked for further comment on the dispute, Sieg declined on advice of legal counsel.
Brokers Cushman & Wakefield Thalhimer already list the building for sale on their website, at a negotiable asking price. Archived versions of the page show the building placed up for sale as early as February 2024, and again in October 2025; it’s not clear whether it remained on the market for that entire duration. Thalhimer employees did not respond to requests for comment.
The landlords say they’ve got no information about the status of events already scheduled at the club, suggesting that interested parties contact Common House management. In a statement, Tom Tom Foundation Director Paul Beyer says daytime sessions of the Tom Tom Festival previously slated for Common House between April 22 and 25 will still take place there. Evening sessions have been relocated, and the festival has postponed its Prom Prom party until later this year.
Since opening in Charlottesville in 2017, Common House has branched out across the South, opening in Richmond in 2020, Chattanooga in 2021, and New Orleans in 2024. At last report, those locations remain open. Business records filed in Virginia between 2022 and 2024 show that Common House had at least considered additional expansions into Louisville, Memphis, Baltimore, Columbus, and Minneapolis.
Under new management
Though Common House’s website still mentions Rogers, Pfinsgraff, and Sieg as co-founders, records show they quietly sold the company to a group of new owners in the early summer of 2024. Pfinsgraff seemingly stepped down as CEO in October 2024, when he was replaced by Ben Wood. Wood’s resume shows a string of experiences at real estate-related companies whose ambitious approach to expansion backfired.
From December 2017 to May 2023, Wood served as the Global Head of Operations – Enterprise for WeWork. The company helped to pioneer the idea of coworking, providing shared office space to companies and individual workers. But it leased new buildings faster than it created demand to fill them, running up massive debts it couldn’t repay. In November 2023, several months after Wood left, WeWork filed for bankruptcy.
After leaving WeWork, Wood spent May 2023 to January 2024 as vice president of finance and operations for The X Company in Denver, Colorado. The Chicago-based startup, unrelated to the similarly named social network, aimed to build a series of amenity-rich buildings that combined apartment living, coworking spaces, and social clubs for residents. But in 2023 and 2024, news reports showed its funding and developments repeatedly falling through. (Though Wood’s resume suggests he built internal systems and processes for these companies, he does not appear to have been involved in their high-level decision-making.)
At its flagship X1 Denver property, the company closed the in-house social club in December 2023, saying it was transferring the building to a new management team. That new team may have been Hub & Balance, which Wood founded in January 2024 as a “full service membership, coworking and employee experience consulting group.” A July 2024 archive of Hub & Balance’s site mentioned that it was operating all of The X Company’s Denver and Phoenix locations; earlier archives are unavailable.
Between December 2023 and March 2024, residents of X1 Denver interviewed by local media reported poorly maintained facilities, uncooperative management, and a catastrophic burst pipe at the rooftop pool that flooded the building, damaging apartments and driving tenants away.
Though X1 Denver remains open and is soliciting new tenants, it’s unclear whether Hub & Balance still runs any X properties in Denver or elsewhere. The company’s website no longer exists. When C-VILLE called X1 Denver to ask who operates it now, the person who answered the phone abruptly hung up.
Wood and the current management of Common House did not respond to requests for comment.
“I’ve been out of Common House for a while now, but I’ve never stopped loving the clubs,” Sieg says, speaking as an individual, not on the landlords’ behalf. “Common House has been something I’ve been incredibly proud to be a part of for so many years. … I’d have done just about anything to see it stay in Charlottesville.”
