PORT TOWNSEND — A lot of the people who walk into Conservatory Coastal Home ask for a beer.
“This was a bar for a really long time,” said Heather Pollock, owner of the store at 635 Water St., in Port Townsend.
“So I get a lot of people coming in here telling me stories about how much fun they had here.”
The store, an expansion of a smaller space that Pollock has run for a year, contains Northwest-style crafts and furnishings, and its light, high-ceilinged atmosphere is about as far from a dark bar as you could get.
Still, the memories of Water Street Brewing, the Town Tavern or any other name by which the place was known gets conversations started.
Water Street Brewing closed in June 2010. The space in the N.D. Hill Building — built in 1888 and on the National Register of Historic Places — has been vacant since then.
Pollock was doing well in her old location, the former Christian Science Reading Room, when landlord Chris Sudlow approached her about renting the former bar.
Along with her husband, Sam, Pollock set about renovating the space.
Sudlow redid the floors, while Pollocks painted, cleaned the windows, built shelves and installed the tree branches in the rear of the store that gives the space a Northwest flavor.
Pollock expanded the offerings of her smaller store while incorporating some of the lessons learned from a year in retail.
She had been importing wooden tables from China and other locales and thought she was paying too much for low-quality goods.
“I noticed how my orders were going from China to San Francisco and then up here and I was paying a lot of shipping costs,” she said.
“I thought that I could get the same goods made here by some of the local artists, and it would help our economy.”
As an example, Pollock sells a handcrafted wooden bowl for $98, which is the wholesale price she paid for a similar imported product.
Pollock has made her own candles at home and sold them at the Port Townsend Farmers Market for several years.
This week, she moved her candle-making operation into the back of the store.
“This is more efficient, but it will also add to the atmosphere, since the scents used for candlemaking will filter out into the store,” she said.
Custom pillows and driftwood art are some of the products that Pollock hopes will draw customers in, and give the store an identity beyond that of a former bar.
Even so, Pollock enjoys the conversations about the place’s earlier function and would like to put a book on the counter where people can write down their bar stories and memories.
This could include a tale told by Geoff Masci, a former Port Townsend mayor who is challenging Phil Johnson for his District 1 county commission seat in the Nov. 6 election.
Masci was sitting at the bar when a song by Neil Young came on the jukebox and Masci remarked loudly that he hated Young’s voice.
Masci couldn’t figure out why his friends were telling him to shut up until he looked down the bar and saw the musician himself, who was in town working on his boat.
Young’s reaction, according to Masci, was “buy that man a beer.”
Pollock doesn’t think the bar memories will ever slow down, and hopes to recreate at least part of the store’s former atmosphere by serving small glasses of beer instead of the traditional wine at next weekend’s art walk.
For more information call 360-385-3857 or go to www.conservatorycoastalhome.com.
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
