A Happy Event (Venue)

Our founder, Jennifer Jerde, her architect husband, Daniel Castor are the new tenants of the historic Sonoma County National Bank building located in downtown Petaluma. Vacant for several years, the beloved building had become a dusty relic with an enormous “FOR RENT! PRICE REDUCED!” sign in the window. After a year of permitting and bootstrapping their way through a gauntlet of unglamorous and profoundly expensive renovations, Jen, Daniel, and a generous start-up team of locals re-opened the then 98-year-old building as an event venue in October 2024. It is now open for rentals, and is the host of multiple community events a month.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The story of how Jen and Daniel ended up opening an event venue in downtown Petaluma last year is a long one, spanning both decades and various interests and pursuits. To name a few:

• Daniel is an architect and an artist with a passion for geometry, an interest in historic buildings, and a great love of delighting people—his greatest joy is creating things that will blow people’s minds at a dance party. 
• At Elixir, we’ve spent years working on events (with Tipping Point, SF MOMA, SF Jazz, UCSF, NFWF, AFC, and California Academy of Sciences, to name a few).
• In addition to caring a lot about the arts, culture, and the designed world, Jen and Daniel have always shared a love of pre-owned, vintage antiques (check out Daniel’s thermos collection here, Elixir’s ode to junk here).
• Over the years, Jen and Daniel spent many a late night working on festivals and parade floats for their daughters’ magical Waldorf-inspired school. With the closure of the school, there was a longing to keep that community together and to make possible the joy of co-creativity.

These disparate things came together in a surprising place: the historic Sonoma County National Bank in downtown Petaluma. It’s a beautiful old building, ready for a variety of gorgeous events, in a town that throws a beloved yearly parade (hello float-building skills) and a twice-yearly antique fair.

Coming out of the pandemic, Danny’s studio in San Rafael had become so full of his experiments and immense geometric cardboard structures that he had run out of space for community gatherings (nevermind that the space isn’t zoned for assembly). One day, Danny found himself in Petaluma for a project, saw the building for lease, and thought “Wow, somebody’s gonna have a lot of fun with that.” 

It started as a dream of having an office and an immense gallery space for his work where their community could assemble now and then. But it eventually morphed towards a community venue. The build-out required an investment of money to bring the permitted occupancy from 49 people to 250, and construction ended up costing 3-4x what was anticipated. The financial reality is that it could be 10 years before this project breaks even, if ever. But the reason to do it is for the relational and creative opportunities that it affords. 

IDENTITY

Elixir has (of course) been working up a brand visual language for the project. We started with a simple typeset wordmark, but realized that the building itself meant something to locals more than the name. In fact, the building is often still referred to as the Old Seed Bank, which called the building home from 2009 to 2018. Jen asked Danny to do an engraving-style illustration of the building and Elixir’s Nathan Durrant simplified it radically.

Additionally, we’ve created versions for nighttime and small-use cases, where we reduced the detail in both the type and the building.

To celebrate the opening of Hall of the Above, HOTA team member Brody suggested that we create a limited edition lunar calendar, printed with white foil on Colorplan Imperial Blue paper.

So, here we are, with an immense space in Petaluma, with very few bookings and a few loyal local friends (aka Hallunteers) working for free. It’s one thing to make the most out of budgets and another to have no budget at all. If we know anything, it is that necessity is the mother of invention… and that stress can be motivating.

In the meantime, we hope that the community can enjoy the space, whether it be for a Swing Night, Line Dance, or Halloween extravangaza, and that all of our Elixir extended circle gets a chance to see the space—it truly is a very special place.