With its town square secured, Graton turns to creating a community cafe in the old firehouse
Fueled by a group of young organizers, Graton just keeps doing amazing things
Big things are happening in the little town of Graton, Sebastopol’s neighbor to the north. At the beginning of November, the Graton Community Services District announced that it had completed acquisition of the Graton Town Square property, a roughly half-acre site in the heart of downtown Graton, thanks to a $750,000 Community Spaces grant from Sonoma County Ag & Open Space and more than 150 private donors.
This acquisition marks the culmination of a years-long, community-driven effort to transform the last undeveloped parcel in downtown Graton into a permanent public gathering space. In its first year, the town square has hosted over 20 public events, including the first-ever Green Valley Food & Wine Festival and a Holiday Lights & Tractor Parade.
Now a power-house group of community organizers and food professionals are spearheading an effort to turn the town’s old firehouse next the West County Trail into a community cafe called Graton Station. At the end of October, they held a meeting for potential investors at the Paul Mathew tasting room in downtown Graton, followed by a tour of the old firehouse.
At the meeting, organizer Matt Jorgensen gave a brief introduction to the project:
“Really the starting point is the cafe, coffee shop that everyone has wanted in Graton for a long time,” he began. “It goes beyond that and has a more creative layer. We’re trying to not be in the restaurant industry, but we really do want to build an interesting creative hub that can be profitable, that can be sustainable, as a community pillar.”
“The ways that we’re thinking of doing that are a traditional coffee shop cafe business, but then layered on with Adrian and Farrell’s concept, which is called Preservatory. Preservatory is all about taking ag surplus from the local farms and processing into value-added products. So we’ll have a small kind of bodega shop in there where you can buy jams and ferments and sodas and sauces that are made from whatever’s in abundance from our farms here in the watershed. Our menu in the cafe will feature those things as well. It’ll be a small, rotating menu, and you might get some of these really luxurious items that are coming directly off of our farms in a really cost-accessible and affordable way.”
The founding team includes Matt Jorgensen and Tory Immel, two of the main organizers behind the Graton Town Square; restaurant veterans Adrian Apana, a chef who worked at SingleThread in Healdsburg, and Ferrell Carter, who honed her hospitality and restaurant management skills at Quail & Condor, Troubadour, and The Redwood. This group has also looped in designer Cathy Smith, who was part of the design team for Shed in Healdsburg.
To bring their vision to life, the group is raising money through a private offering to accredited investors. Called the “Founder’s Circle,” this investment group is not open to the public and is scheduled to close in December.
In early 2026, they plan to open a community crowdfunding campaign — inviting local residents to join a “Founders Village” for as little as $500 in the spirit of shared ownership.
To raise awareness and interest in their project, the group has “activated” the space with coffee cart pop-ups throughout August and September.
Here’s the timeline for the development of the project:
After the team introduced themselves to the assembled group of potential investors, everyone moved across the street for a tour of the old firehouse. The Graton Station team is currently leasing the front half of the building—a vast, beautiful space with a tall clerestory that was added by the current owners of the building.
“The building was bought by George and Lisa Melo 13 years ago, and they’ve done a lot of renovation and rehab work on it and have always kind of dreamed that it would be some sort of community institution like this,” Jorgenson said. “And I think it was finally the right time—and maybe we were the right people—to get the lease and be able to move forward.”