Walnut Studiolo Moves to the North Oregon Coast

Effective January 4, 2016, we are moving the Walnut Studiolo office and workshop (and our home!) from to a new, larger location in rural Tillamook County, just outside Nehalem on the North Oregon Coast. 

There are three reasons why we're moving to the Oregon Coast, and three reasons why we're leaving Portland. In this post, we'll tell you the whole story! 

Knowing we had to leave Portland (more on that below), we are thrilled beyond measure that we could achieve our life's dream of moving to one our favorite places on the planet. 

There are three reasons we're moving to the Oregon Coast:

We have always been simply drawn to the beauty of the Oregon Coast, with its opportunities for solitude, and the great Pacific Ocean. 

Growing up, Geoff spent his summers near Manzanita. We got married on the Oregon Coast, and have come out to the Coast annually ever since.

The Oregon Coast is rugged and breathtaking. Nearby, mountains with jagged rocks and sheer cliffs, collide with crashing waves under a canopy of misty gray skies shoved around by blustery wind. 

This isn't where you go for a bikini beach bum vacation -- the ocean is freezing cold, it's often windy, and the sky is moody. The Oregon Coast is for adventures. It is only when you get quiet and sink in that you discover tiny tide pools teeming with colorful sea creatures and critters crawling among the rocks. 

Here you can climb into the forested hills through dense lichen-draped Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and Western hemlock along fern-lined trails to discover thrilling narrow bluffs with sweeping coastal views. The thick haze of rainy air envelops the landscape with muted tones. We find ourselves inexplicably drawn to this rustic intensity and striking environment - an endless source of inspiration.

This rural area has affordable big buildings to support our growing craft business. Our unique products and handcrafted quality have become increasingly sought after, both locally and internationally, and the Portland workshop in our home garage was starting to burst at the seams. 

In moving to the Nehalem Valley, we are joining a different vibrant maker community. The entrepreneurial spirit and creativity of the North Coast is thriving. 

Businesses like Nehalem River Ranch, the first Animal Welfare Approved and Grassfed Certified ranch in Oregon, are committed to sustainability, humanitarian practices and innovation, just like us. 

Our workshop is now tucked at the edge of the woods. The broad shop doors open wide and the environment around us seeps in: energizing our work with every birdsong or rustle of the towering spruce and hemlock branches that canopy overhead. 

And when the long day's work draws to a close, we can shutter the doors and walk to our home.

Best of all, our new home is in an area for bike touring: we're an easy stop right off Highway 101, home to the Oregon Coast Bike Route and Adventure Cycling Association's Pacific Coast Route, fat tire biking on the beach. 

And soon-to-come: the Salmonberry Rail to Trail will create a safer, off-the-road bike path from the outskirts of Portland to just about our doorstep.

We started and grew Walnut Studiolo out of our home in Southeast Portland. We had one large workbench in a 2-car garage, and Geoff was spending too much time converting and cleaning it up as a multi-functional work station. Cutting, dyeing, assembling, all required different tools to be brought onto the table and then put back. 

We had spread out as much as we could on our property. We moved the inventory, shipping, and office into the house and it took over the dining room, living room, and spare bedrooms. Finally, we even built a yurt in the backyard as an extra workspace. But we still needed more room! 

There were no affordable commercial building opportunities available to rent or buy (that wouldn’t have destroyed our lifestyle).

Our options were to:

A) Rent an artist studio in a commercial building. Unfortunately, at that time, Portland was experiencing explosive growth and property developers were cashing in. Reliable cheap warehouse spaces and artist studios were getting converted into high-paying condos. We knew of several artists who had been kicked out of their spaces and then a huge and beloved downtown space suddenly sent 50 artist businesses scrambling (read: Exodus At Towne Storage: Artists Scatter In Search For Affordable Space).

There was too much demand and not enough supply for artist spaces, and our timing was bad. Even if we had found one, there was a real risk that they could decide to turn it into condos at any time. 

We also knew, from Geoff’s experience working in architecture, that the businesses who own their own buildings are more resilient during hard times. We wanted this business to last our lifetime.

B) Buy a small commercial building ourselves. We went through an advising program with the Small Business Development Center, got our finances in order, and applied to banks for a commercial property. Our small business was pre-approved to buy a building for a million dollars!

So we started looking... and there wasn’t much available. Portland does not have many commercial buildings at all, by design, according to code. There were only a handful of small commercial buildings that met our budget within biking distance of our home, and none were for sale. We tried cold-calling some with a commercial broker, but it didn't pan out. It didn’t help that this was right when Oregon had legalized cannabis. Oregon was the first state to allow out-of-state investors, so the market was flooded with speculative money buying up exactly the kind of commercial buildings we were looking for in the cannabis gold rush.

Once again, our timing was bad and we just couldn’t compete. However, sometimes not getting what you want is a good thing! 

In hindsight, it seems like a big enough loan to get us into trouble. We believe that even if we had succeeded, the mortgage on that building probably would have buried us. We would have either ceased to be a lifestyle business, or gone bankrupt. 

It is the rustic, rugged beauty that has captured our hearts. So from here on out, every time you buy one of our Walnut Studiolo handmade leather products, you'll harvest a taste of that salty-sweet sea air and the misty skies that inspire everything we do. We know our new workshop and home have so much potential, and we can't wait to see what comes next.