The Oak Lawn Apartments will soon be renamed, but their new owner says renovations will preserve architectural and decorative features that give the building on Cherry Street its charm.

Home to Vicksburg residents since the 1930s, the brick apartment building at 2240 Cherry was first owned by a grandfather of Realtor Ernest Thomas and later by the family of Ellis Bodron, who served in the Mississippi Senate through four decades, until 1984. Closed for the past two years, the apartments were sold by Bodron’s daughter to Matthew Guinn, a former assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who plans to rename them Big Sky Court, after his company, Big Sky Developments.

Guinn, who came to Vicksburg looking for a real estate investment, said one look at the building impressed him. He admired the high ceilings, wooden floors, divided windows, period molding and the courtyard between the building’s two front-projecting wings.

“You just can’t find that in new construction,” he said.

Guinn is a resident of Ridgeland and was born in Atlanta.

Flirting with a career in academia, small real estate investments helped support him while he pursued a doctorate.

“My wife and I flipped houses to put us through graduate school,” he said.

He earned a doctorate in American literature from the University of South Carolina in 1998. He then lived in Jackson for several years and taught at the University of Mississippi.

His dissertation, “After Southern Modernism,” was published in 2000 by University Press of Mississippi.

Guinn later spent several years as an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Alabama, teaching courses in American literature. He then moved to Ridgeland, where his wife, Kristen, opened a store, and he thought again about real estate, though he wasn’t interested in subdivisions or new developments.

“I was in Madison, and there you’ve got the gated communities of 200 ‘McMansions,’ That’s the opposite of what we want to do.” To him, the building on Cherry at its intersection with Harris Street and Halls Ferry Road represents a style not being built these days and that fuels his interest in preserving the building’s original character.

Guinn said he was smitten with the apartment building, a three-story brick structure built in 1935, according to information provided by the Vicksburg Foundation for Historical Preservation. Guinn compared Vicksburg with two of his favorite cities, Asheville, N.C., and Athens, Ga., both of which are college towns experiencing “boom years.”

Guinn said he first eyed Jackson, but, “everything was either in an unsafe area or was too expensive.” A friend, Richie Caldwell, of Coldwell Banker Real Estate, suggested Vicksburg.

Guinn’s wife, Kristen, recently opened Jodie Badon, a boutique in Ridgeland selling, among other items, upscale bridal wear, stationery and gifts. The simultaneous endeavors have kept the couple busy, he said.

Guinn said he spent about $250,000 buying the building and has put substantial sums into fixing it up.

Work is under way to update kitchens and redo flooring in the eight, two-bedroom and four, one-bedroom apartments.

“He plans on doing a bang-up job,” said Timothy DeRossette of Coldwell Banker.

Guinn said he hopes to rent the apartments — which he estimated at about 1,200 square feet — fully furnished. On Tuesday, he signed his first tenant.

She leased a furnished, two-bedroom apartment for $1,350 per month, which includes utilities, he said.