A nonprofit with a mission to preserve historic buildings in Point Reyes Station, keep them in local hands and recruit businesses that meet community needs has purchased the former Station House Café building.
The Point Reyes Good Luck Fund acquired the property, which has sat vacant for about two years, for $1.8 million—a full $1 million below the asking price. It closed the deal on May 16 and plans to confer with community members before recruiting potential tenants.
“We’re going to host an open-house event at the old Station House soon to gather community input and gauge what the community would like to see there,” said Heather Mickley, the fund’s operations manager.
The Good Luck Fund has already received several proposals for new uses for the space, including for a restaurant and an art space, said Ms. Mickley, who paid a visit to the property’s spacious patio and garden after the fund reached a deal for the property this month.
“We feel very hopeful,” she said. “There’s so much potential for the space, and we hope to continue our mission by securing these sorts of key buildings and making sure they’re locally owned and operated for as long as possible.”
The building was constructed in 1950 on the grounds of the former Northwestern Pacific railyards and originally housed a saloon and restaurant called the Silver Dollar Inn, according to local historian Dewey Livingston. Later, a couple named George and Edna Ball purchased the business and renamed it the Two Ball Inn. In the 1980s, the building housed a Mexican restaurant called Mi Casa until the Station House moved in after an extensive remodel in 1989. After the landlord raised the rent in 2020, owner Sheryl Cahill relocated to the establishment’s original location across main street.
The old Station House is the second property purchased by the foundation, which also bought the Old Western Saloon in March, when local tech entrepreneur Chris Hulls announced that he was forming the nonprofit and contributing $15 million to it.
Petaluma Health Center had been considering the Station House property as a possible site for a geriatric care center but is now investigating other options, according to its C.E.O., Pedro Toledo. Meanwhile, it is working with the Good Luck Fund on a possible purchase of the West Marin Pharmacy.
“We are collaborating to preserve and potentially enhance pharmacy access in Point Reyes,” Mr. Toledo said. “Ensuring continuity of care, including pharmacy services, is a key part of our commitment to the community. Petaluma Health is also continuing to assess alternative sites in West Marin that could meet the programmatic and regulatory needs of a geriatric clinic.”
A Tomales High School graduate who grew up in Point Reyes Station, Mr. Hulls was among many residents who opposed the county-approved renovation of the Point Reyes Gas Station that will bring a full-scale convenience store to town. It will be one of roughly 15 similar establishments owned by Redwood Oil across Northern California.
Mr. Hulls, who owns a home in town and is the vice president of the Point Reyes Station Village Association, established the fund in part to help ensure that future projects are suited to the town’s historic character and support locally owned businesses.
The gas station project will provide five apartment units in a community where rentals are scarce. Association members said they support housing but argued that the convenience store will compound traffic at a dangerous intersection, lure students from the nearby West Marin School with junk food, draw customers from competing local businesses and strip the building of key architectural features. They packed public hearings to speak out against the plan and unsuccessfully appealed the project to the Board of Supervisors and the California Coastal Commission.
Some association members also objected to the idea of a geriatric center at the Station House site, raising concerns about compounding traffic.
Ms. Mickley said the fund intends to work closely with the association, which may soon seek its own nonprofit status and formalize its relationship with the fund.
“This is really a positive step forward in trying to secure more community-oriented businesses,” Steve Antonaros, the village association president, said of the Station House purchase. “By that, I mean businesses that support the local community values, which we know from the gas station aren’t shared by all property owners.”
There is nothing in county development rules that would prevent an Applebee’s or some other national chain from moving into the Station House space, Mr. Antonaros said. “This is a great step forward for securing the kind of local economy we have had historically and nurturing a local business as opposed to an outside franchise.”
While a food establishment seems a logical occupant for the new space, getting a new one off the ground would present some challenges. Due to the housing shortage, retail businesses around West Marin have a difficult time recruiting and retaining staff.
“Starting something up that’s been vacant for a long time is hard,” said Mark Switzer, the village association’s secretary. “If I could wave a magic wand, there’d be a cooperatively owned restaurant that would enable many essential workers to make a decent living, and maybe with housing on site.”
Mr. Switzer added: “The real news in this instance is that there’s an underlying commitment to try to gain some kind of feasible and realistic community input into whatever occurs there.”
The fund is developing a model that would allow local investors to buy shares in the businesses that the fund recruits to occupy them.
“We will encourage shared ownership of these buildings,” Ms. Mickley said. “Once we get the right candidate in and things are moving smoothly, we would open it up for local investment so that silent partners could buy into a turnkey business. We would handle the legal, financial and property management, and they would get a percentage of the return on the business.”
In addition to Point Reyes Station, the fund is considering acquiring properties in Inverness, Marshall and Olema. It has not identified any potential future acquisitions, but several high-profile properties remain vacant, including the Green Barn and Vladimir’s Czech Restaurant.
Mr. Hulls is the founder of Life360, a location-sharing app. He said he founded the fund to share his good fortune with the community he loves and to give others the opportunity to do the same.
“What’s great about Chris is he’s not closed to any options,” Mr. Antonaros said. “That opens a lot of opportunities for the village association to help provide a forum for discussions about the best use of the Station House property. I’m looking forward to those kinds of conversations. We’re on the cusp of a different kind of way of looking at long-term development out here.”