We’d like to welcome our new business columnist, Martin Reed, a local Realtor who lives in Sebastopol, loves this town and is deeply invested in its success. He’s also the executive director of the Sonoma County Tool Library. Martin will be doing these columns on a semi-regular basis, depending on what’s happening around town. What’s this column going to be like? According to Martin, “It’ll mostly be the good stuff – what’s opening, changing, and worth celebrating around Sebastopol – with the occasional goodbye.”
As a Realtor, I spend my days watching spaces in this town change hands, and Sebastopol has always been a place that reinvents itself. Lately, there is a lot of new life filling old rooms.
What’s new at The Barlow?
I rent an office at Barlow Co-Work, which makes me a paying customer and not a neutral party. That said, it has quietly become one of my favorite places to get work done. If you work remotely, it is worth knowing about, especially when the Livery is packed or the power is out, and you need a reliable place to land.
While I have been settling in, the food side of the Barlow keeps getting better. Chippy, a fish and chips counter from Acre Pizza’s Steve DeCosse, opened this summer in the former Acre Pasta space with chowder, a burger, and the obvious. I grabbed lunch there last week, and the fish came out hot and properly crisp.
And there is more coming this fall. The Wild Poppy, the West County cafe from chef-owners Danielle and Martin Maigaard, is set to open a second location in the long-empty Woodfour Brewing space, with a plant-forward, seafood-leaning menu and an on-site tofu operation in the old brewing room. A brewery reborn as a tofu works may be the most West County makeover of the year.
There is a sweeter addition on the way too. Angela’s Organic Ice Cream is getting its own counter inside Iggy’s Organic Burger, in the old Cock Robin space on Sebastopol Avenue. It should be open within the month. The two brands are family, started by Angela Pryor and her son Ignacio “Iggy” Garat after they took over Lala’s Creamery in Petaluma in 2017. Angela’s has since grown to Forestville, Healdsburg, Mill Valley, two Petaluma parlors and a few San Francisco shops. A burger and a scoop under one roof is a hard combination to argue with, especially with kids in tow after an afternoon at Ragle Ranch.
The Porch steps up to dinner
Just behind the Rialto, on the edge of the Barlow, The Porch Kitchen has grown up. Chef Lisa Boisset and her husband Kevin, the caterers behind The Cook & The Drummer, opened it late last year as a daytime grab-and-go counter in the old Goatlandia catering kitchen. Demand to sit and linger outran the plan, and this summer they added full dinner service. Think scratch-made French bistro, dry-aged beef sliders, pan-seared wild salmon, a real salade lyonnaise, from a Cordon Bleu-trained chef who still bakes her own focaccia. Easy to miss, worth finding.
Turkish and Mediterranean on Healdsburg Ave
Another old room has new life in it. Alesta Modern Mediterranean opened this spring at 7233 Healdsburg Ave, in the space that held Piala, the Georgian restaurant and wine bar that closed last year after a three-year run. Alesta founders Ugur Akkaya and chef Kadir Senel pull from Turkish, Greek and Eastern Mediterranean cooking with French technique behind it, a meze-forward menu, grilled meats and seafood, and complimentary Turkish black tea. It is an unassuming strip-mall setting, which in my experience is often where the best food hides. Open Tuesday through Sunday, with dinner from 5 pm.
A couple of goodbyes
Not every update is an opening. We said goodbye to Campanella, the Italian-American spot on Healdsburg Ave, which closed this spring after a short run. And Coffee & Moore, the coffee house over at Gravenstein Station on Sebastopol Avenue, has closed its doors as well. Closings are part of the cycle, and I would rather send folks off with thanks than pretend the town never changes.
New homes and the market
The north end of town keeps filling in. City Ventures is building The Canopy, 80 townhomes flanking the O’Reilly buildings off Highway 116. St. Vincent de Paul’s Gravenstein Commons is adding 22 studios of supportive housing nearby. And Habitat for Humanity just handed keys to four families at Blankenship Place downtown. That’s 106 new homes, about five years of building for Sebastopol in one go, and roughly half of what the state expects the city to produce by 2031.
The resale market is quieter than the headlines suggest. Rates sat in the mid- to high-6s most of the year, but the Fed raised its benchmark rate a quarter point on Sept. 16, its first hike in three years, and the 30-year fixed is now running a little above 7 percent. Buyers and sellers were already sitting on their hands, and Sebastopol only closes about ten sales a month to begin with. At that volume, the monthly median is mostly noise. Last November, it read up 79 percent year over year, on three sales. By June it read down 27 percent.
Over a full year, it’s flat. Inventory is below last year, prices are roughly where they were, and homes priced right still sell close to asking.
A town that shows up
A couple of recent gatherings reminded me why I like writing the good-news version of this town. The Building the Commons open house filled the O’Reilly campus on Gravenstein Highway one afternoon, where neighbors toured the site the Commons Committee hoped to turn into a shared civic and cultural hub. The council declined to embrace this concept; however, they may revisit the idea in December. A community film night at the Rialto, “Join and Thrive,” soon after drew the same kind of full, engaged room. Both were packed, and the energy was real. Plenty of towns cannot fill a room. We can.
Thanks to Sebastopol Area Chamber of Commerce Director Myriah Volk for her help with this article.
Have news for the next column? Reach me at martin@martinreed.com or (707) 329-3331.
Great reporting. Thanks for stepping up.
Thank you! I do believe that Martin's column will be a valuable addition to the Sebastopol Times.