Steel-and-Glass Barn Stocks Food and the Goods to Grow it in Healdsburg
Author:Lindsey ShookFor epicurean pilgrims, one more stop will soon be added on the march to Mecca. Healdsburg Shed won’t be just another farmers’ market. Rather, it will be a place that pulls back the curtain on all its lovely jars of pickled root vegetables, months-cured charcuterie, and countless bottles of pinot, merlot and chardonnay.
“I wanted to create something that could illustrate the complete food cycle—growing, preparing and enjoying,” says Cindy Daniel, the founder of Sonoma County’s latest culinary concept, which is scheduled to open to a hungry public in mid-March. The nearly 10,000-square-foot modern steel-and-glass barn-like structure will house a marketplace filled with tasty foodstuffs fit for the most impressive dinner party, as well as all the goods needed to grow, make or cultivate them for yourself. The shelves will be stocked with hand-forged garden tools, organic seeds, beekeeping hives and supplies, fermentation crocks, tortilla presses, canning equipment, and sausage-stuffing machines.
“I wanted to make this place feel alive, to link back to the hand behind things, instead of just offering the finished products,” says Daniel, who, with her husband, Doug Lipton, has tended their own 16-acre farm for more than a decade. To that end, the beer and wine bar will be dubbed the Fermentation Bar, and the marketplace will also play host to educational workshops and classes—moves that emphasize the process over the final product.
Daniel hired San Francisco’s Jensen Architects to design the building, which opens to the outside via rolling garage doors on three sides and, in addition to the market, houses a glass-fronted larder, a full-service cafe, a grain mill and an event space. And although some city folks may see Shed’s full range of offerings as aspirational rather than realistic, Daniel points out that in Healdsburg and neighboring rural communities, growing and making has long been a way of life. Says Daniel, “People are coming to this area because they want to be a part of it.”
This was originally published in California Home + Design’s Spring issue, click here to subscribe.
