Methow Store Prepares for Grand Opening July 5-7
There’s a saying that everything happens in due time.
The Methow Store is finally getting its turn after shuttering its doors some 25 years ago, by the new owners’ estimates. The 130 year old store will have a soft opening July 4, 3-6 pm, with a grand opening celebration July 5-7.
A sign outside the store reads, “Even on Methow Time, It Happens!”
It happened by unexpected circumstances. Shayne Naudi and Allen Giernet were driving north on 153 to look at properties in the valley. They wanted to move to a place away from the hustle and bustle of LA where they had lived so much of their lives. As they passed the run-down store and cafe, Naudi exclaimed, “Stop the car!” Naudi and Giernet explored the valley from Mazama to Methow and a dozen more stops between Washington and California, but their heart stayed with the first place they saw in Methow.
“When she saw that building, it had nothing to do with the fact that it was a café. It was the building itself that she fell in love with and the idea that we had the courtyard and the property around it,” said Giernet. Naudi wanted to turn the place into an educational space for people to learn how to live sustainably and support businesses that do the same.
“I just saw that funky building and the vibe in there and I loved it,” said Naudi. “And when we walked into the store, I was like, well, this is a tear down. This is a hot mess.”
They didn’t tear it down. They rehabilitated it from the ground up, a labor of love that presented more than just the expected challenges that come with a remodel.
Two Projects at Once
Naudi and Giernet closed on the purchase of raw land in French Creek in June 2018, just three months after they set foot in the Methow. However, negotiations to buy the store kept falling through, just like the rest of the building as it sat vacant. After three years of waiting, Naudi and Giernet wrote off buying the store and cafe and signed a contract to construct a home on their property. Shortly thereafter, in LA, Naudi received a message on an answering machine that the store was theirs if they wanted it.
“[The seller] said, if you want to buy the buildings with the offer from two years ago, the offer is on the table,” said Naudi. “I just came out [of my office]. I was white as a sheet and I said to Allen, oh my God, we’ve just committed, and now I have this opportunity. I was shaking and I wanted to vomit because I was like, I can’t believe this. We just signed, we officially committed to our home, and now I have this chance of a lifetime that I thought I closed that door and Allen, what did you say?”
“I gave her the analogy while you’re standing at the edge of the cliff, you get two choices. You either turn around and walk away and never know, or you jump off and go for it. And so, we decided to jump,” said Giernet.
Due to logistics, Naudi and Giernet bought both buildings- the café and the store, which included a courtyard. They put their energies on remodeling the store first. The store will offer conventional and organic food, supplies, gifts, and a small café, but they have jokingly called it “not the café kitchen.” They haven’t decided yet what to do with the cafe. Ideas include turning it into a restaurant, a rental, or a community space.
Their commute to the store is five minutes from their home, a welcome change from rising at the crack of dawn to beat rush hour traffic in LA. The couple has lived in a trailer while building their home and has had to draw their own water. Now that the store remodel is finished, there is one less thing to do as they juggle running the store and completing the build on their home.
“The biggest challenge was, in some ways, the fact that while I’m doing this, there was no real comfort or ease of going home,” said Naudi. “And there was one winter, I had a dear friend let me stay at her bunk house so I could get here and work when we couldn’t get the heat working. It was 13 degrees in here when we broke ground [at the store.]”
Naudi rehabilitated the store while Giernet was away for long stretches as a ski and avalanche instructor. One early spring, Giernet’s truck slipped out of gear and ran over Naudi. Giernet was in California at the time. Naudi suffered a concussion and broken shoulder, hand and ribs. She doesn’t remember how she called or how a call even went through given that she hadn’t had luck with cell phone reception on the property, but the call went through to a friend who found her on the ground and took her to Three Rivers Hospital in Brewster.
“People ask, why was it taking so long? Well, there was a year, right there,” said Naudi.
“One of the jokes is, if we tell you all our adversity, we would have to kill you,” she added.
When asked how they kept the marriage together, without missing a beat, Giernet said, “This has actually made it stronger. I think the big key to that is we communicate a lot.”
“We are great communicators with each other. We like each other a lot. We drive each other nuts and sometimes we really don’t like each other,” Naudi added, laughing, continuing, “We really love each other. We’re different people and we’re also really similar. Allen’s really good at reminding me to play and to laugh and I think I’m good at making [him] more punctual.”
The couple has created a system for connecting with each other due to long periods apart from Giernet’s work.
“What we’ve created for our communication is our check-ins. We constantly check-in with each other, like, where’s your head space at? What’s going on? What are you feeling? She, being Australian, she won’t let me cop an attitude and just let it go, like, what’s going on, so we talk a lot,” said Giernet.
Growing Up Working with Her Hands
Naudi grew up rehabilitating old homes with her mother and worked in the food industry when she was a teenager. One of her first jobs was working at a burger place in the Blue Mountains of Australia, where she grew up. She received a scholarship to study art in the United States, earning a Bachelor’s in sculpture and a Master’s in Fine Art. To put herself through college, she worked in restaurants and managed kitchens.
Later, Naudi started a landscaping company. Living in California and the Blue Mountains, she knows about drought tolerant vegetation and how to restore a landscape after a fire.
Working with her hands comes naturally to Naudi. Half of her family are farmers and gardeners. The other half were in the fine arts. Her aunt was in the Australian Ballet and her dad was an opera singer.
“I have passion in all of those things- food, gardening, art. Anything that keeps my hands and my brain moving,” she said.
Jumping the Cliff
Naudi was initially eyeing property in Topanga, California, outside of LA, but when she spoke with Giernet about what he wanted, they decided they needed move further away from LA.
“We wanted this lifestyle of community and space and the pressures of Los Angeles were getting really high,” said Naudi. “So we started looking for, what is that utopia? What is that place that we want? And it kept getting further out of California.”
Naudi envisioned a rehab project. She hadn’t envisioned buying raw land.
“When we looked at that raw property, I turned to Allen, I said, ‘this is not this is not what I thought in my head. I don’t do septic and wells and I don’t do new builds. I can fix anything. I can renovate a building. I can live in a shack and make it beautiful, but starting from scratch is not what I want to do. So, if you’re up for this game, okay, let’s do it.’”
Giernet was up to the challenge, and over the next three years, the couple began to move their life from California to Methow. They had never planned on doing two projects at the same time- the store and their home. They took the plunge.
“My whole retirement, everything I’ve worked for, all my squirreling of funds, and everything that I have been working towards is in this valley now,” said Naudi. “I am really proud that we’ve created something beautiful and I think that it will get even more beautiful, because I know that that’s how I function in the world. I want to create beauty wherever I go.”
“I’m going to feel really good about opening these doors. That’s a huge win and I don’t know if we’re going to get even. Maybe that’s the end game. Maybe just opening the door is the start. We don’t know, but we’ve got a whole lifetime here in the valley to figure it out, and that’s what I’m really looking forward to. I’m exhausted. I know Allen’s exhausted, and we’re not ready. This is not my idea of perfection. I don’t have every cubby here filled. We haven’t got things entered. I don’t know my menu. It’s a hot mess. And you know what? We’re going to open these doors and hopefully people have a really good time. And I’m so happy to be here in the valley and I just, I just love it. I love everything that this stands for, and the community support that we’ve had is astounding,” said Naudi.
“She fell in love with the cafe when she saw it, but this old building has really grabbed both of us,” said Giernet. “We’ve fallen in love with this building and the history behind it, what it stands for and symbolizes as well in the valley. And so, a big part of us opening this up is actually preserving that, that history and that memory and the tradition of an old general store mercantile that has been lost in Walmart and those type of industrialized commercial projects. We came here to slow down a little bit, and we’re trying to offer a place where other people could slow down and take a breath and just enjoy what’s out here.”
Slowing Down and Building Community
When Naudi and Giernet decided to slow down, they took it seriously. They didn’t want to deal with traffic at the main thoroughfare in Winthrop and even the pedestrian flags in Twisp turned them off. They want to provide a calming environment for themselves and others while also living in harmony with it.
“We’re at a place that everyone’s really overwhelmed with the negative news and the state of the planet and the speed of things, the speed of life, and we’re hoping that we can provide something where people can come in and have options and like, as Alan said, slow down a little bit and see that there’s a different way,” said Naudi.
“I really believe in the human spirit. Sometimes we’re a little slow, but we have to figure this out. I think the valley, and what this valley stands for, that the right people are here. We’re a drop in the bucket. I know it’s not going to make a big global impact at all, but I believe in the individual, and the individual hopefully becomes a collective,” she added.
“The idea of turning the world around is overwhelming and impossible, but if you can just push the needle a little bit in the right direction each day, and that’s what we’re trying to do here- just kind of push that needle to where we want to go. That’s way less overwhelming than, oh my God, we’ve got to stop CO2 emissions and stop war and feed the homeless and everything. You try to take it all in, and it’s really overwhelming,” said Giernet.
“There’s so many people doing such brilliant things here and that is so incredible. It’s so inspiring that people see a need of like, well, I’m going to stand up and make the world a better place. And if everyone stands up, we can make it a better place and how freaking awesome is that?” added Naudi. “We’re all going to have our bad days, and we’re all going to get overwhelmed, and we’re all going to sit down and go, I can’t do this, but collectively, I think we can, so that’s what I hope anyway.”
Redefining Fear
Despite the challenges, Giernet and Naudi say the fear of not trying is worse than what society coins as “failure.”
“Both of us share the fear of not knowing and not trying something much greater than we have a fear of failure,” said Giernet. “Like the fear of not having done anything is way stronger or much stronger than the fear of failure itself.”
“We don’t even know what that means. What does it mean to fail at the end of the day?” said Naudi. “You know, this is the one life we get at the end of the day. We all leave the same way. We all go back to the ground and the shoulda, woulda, couldas is not the life we want to live. We want to be as present as we can. This is hard, all the little things that add up, the mice running over our head in the trailer, [drawing] water, the 13 degrees when we broke ground and not knowing if we could have heat, and I don’t know. It’s endless. The pack rats- aren’t they cute? Oh my goodness, they’re so cute. And all the things you have to learn on the fly about how hard it is to live here and how wonderful it is to live here and do all of this stuff and stick to your guns.”
“It isn’t easy living here.”
Besides the slower pace, Giernet says he and Naudi feel a strong sense of community in the valley which helps everyone survive.
“Even only spending a couple of days here the first time we came to look at the property, we felt such an overwhelming sense of community, and everybody was so welcoming and friendly. It’s really interesting, I think, because no matter who you are, what you do, it isn’t easy living here. It’s a difficult place to live. It doesn’t matter what your political beliefs are, what your theology is, when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of life, everybody tends to get along and work with each other, and that is a very unique and unusual lifestyle almost anywhere else in the world. That’s a big part of why we want to stay here and why we’re so committed to this community here.”
