Bainbridge's Gateway development ready to welcome people to Winslow - Kitsap Sun

By Tad Sooter
Posted April 20, 2014 at 5:19 p.m.

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND — A familiar bakery and a new tavern are among the businesses setting up shop this spring on Bainbridge Island’s busiest street corner.

Contractors are putting finishing touches on the last building in the Island Gateway development at Winslow Way and Highway 305. Interior finish work, driveway paving, landscaping and signage are all that remain to complete the five-year project, said Andrew Lonseth of development firm Asani.

Photo by Meegan M. Reid, Kitsap Sun 

Andrew Lonseth talks about lights to illuminate the Eagle Harbor Market sign that is part of the Island Gateway development at Winslow Way and Highway 305.

Island Gateway already is home to the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Kids Discovery Museum and tech firm Avalara. The final two-story building on Winslow Way is filling fast.

Bainbridge Bakers, a popular café in Winslow Green, will open a second location this week on the ground floor. The bakery will be joined in late June by the Ale House on Winslow, a planned craft beer taproom. Avalara expanded into the top floor of the building. A rooftop event deck will be available for rent.

Photo by Meegan M. Reid, Kitsap Sun

Andrew Lonseth exits the rooftop Thursday of the Island Gateway development on Bainbridge Island.

One street-front retail space in the building remains to be filled. Lonseth said he is in discussions with several potential tenants but nothing has been finalized.

“We’d like a tenant that brings interest and excitement,” Lonseth said. “It’s important to us that we have a destination community.”

Bainbridge Bakers owner Mike Loudon said he’d had his eye on the corner location since well before the Gateway project broke ground.

“It’s the realization of a pretty long dream,” Loudon said Friday.

The new Bainbridge Bakers has seating for 85. Like the original location, it serves coffee, baked goods and food. Beer and wine will be added to the mix later this year.

The café also can double as a venue for theatrical and musical performances. Loudon, an avid community theater booster, said seating can be rearranged to accommodate 150 guests.

“I’m so excited about having it filled with music and people and light,” he said. “It’s going to be something pretty special for the island.”

Bakery customers might well mosey next door after those evening performances. The neighboring Ale House on Winslow aims to fill a niche as a craft beer taproom and late-night hangout.

Photo by Meegan M. Reid, Kitsap Sun

Andrew Lonseth talks Thursday about the remaining construction to take place in the space that will house the Ale House on Winslow in the Island Gateway development on Bainbridge Island.

Travis Samson, one of four partners in the venture, said the Ale House will be outfitted with 16 taps and a wide variety of bottled beer and wine. They plan to stock a large number of local brews, alongside a sampling of domestic brands and a few imports.

“I’d like to make Bainbridge more of a destination for beer geeks,” Samson said. “Our overall goal is to have a beer there for everyone,”

Samson, 27, worked at Silver City Brewery before deciding to go into business with a group of college friends. They still have ambitions to start a microbrewery in Seattle, but Samson said the chance to create a tavern in the Island Gateway was too good to pass up.

Photo by Meegan M. Reid, Kitsap Sun

The Ale House on Winslow sign Thursday adorns one of the windows of the Island Gateway development at Winslow Way and Highway 305.

“It’s literally the first thing you’ll see coming off the ferry,” he said.

The Gateway project rapidly transformed the island’s main entry over the past five years, filling the 5-acre corner with a cluster of distinctly modern structures.

The final building in the development was constructed on the site of the Eagle Harbor Market, a small grocery opened by the Nakata family in the 1940s. The new Gateway building now bears the same name.

“It’s a little historical gesture,” Lonseth said.

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Bainbridge Bakers opens new location next to art museum - KPBJ

April 10, 2014 @ 6:00am | Tim Kelly ~ KPBJ Editor

 

He scouted the location several years ago, before the striking art museum transformed the corner across from the Bainbridge Island ferry. Mike Loudon had his eye on the developing Island Gateway complex and the building that was already there, partly occupied by Avalara, for a possible second location for his business, Bainbridge Bakers.

However, that building soon was filled entirely by Avalara due to the company’s rapid growth, and a spot in the museum didn’t work out either, but Bainbridge Bakers finally gained a foothold and is now a neighbor to both. The new café at the Island Gateway held its long-awaited grand opening March 23, although the bakery wasn’t going to be open for business until around April 1.

“It’s been a long time,” Loudon said earlier in March, sitting on the patio outside the bakery in the Winslow Green center a few blocks down the street from the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.
“We’ve been working on that for about six years, believe it or not.”

The Island Gateway location at the corner of State Route 305 and Winslow Way is similar to the original Bainbridge Bakers — which celebrated 28 years in business on the same day as the grand opening — but the new spot is intended to create a different vibe and fill a different niche.




“The model we built for the new place really envisions a whole new audience,” Loudon said. “We’re anticipating and hoping the new place down there isn’t going to cannibalize our business here at all.”

His business will occupy half the ground floor in the creatively named Building B. It also will provide food service for a taproom in the other half, Ale House on Winslow, expected to open this summer.

Bainbridge Bakers will have a 3,000-square foot space, adjacent to the art museum’s patio, that will be “a little more sophisticated, a little fancier” than his other bakery, Loudon said, in keeping with the new surroundings. The new place also is designed to host occasional live entertainment and it will have beer and wine service, although that won’t start until this summer.

“We want to keep this place (in Winslow Green) the neighborhood go-to place,” he said. “The other place is really designed to service the art museum patrons, the Avalara folks and the commuters that will find us.”

Before the museum was more than a vision and before Avalara had moved into the Island Gateway building that’s now its headquarters, Loudon’s bakery had established a relationship with Avalara by catering meetings and social events for the fast-growing company, which also occupies the entire second floor of Building B.

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