It was by no means a beautiful building. In truth, it was a big metal behemoth, made economically to enclose a hardware store.

Standing in the empty space in February 2022 Brooke said, “This is like the model of the worst vanilla, gross building format to ever come out of architecture…driven by the economics of enclosing cheap space.”

But ultimately, Brooke didn’t see this big, generic space as bad.

Glancing at the expanse, Brooke said, “But, it’s like a generic shell that’ll take anything…the nothing [of the space] is a blank canvas, a lot can be written in that.”

Brooke and Meadows are people with vision and they know how to bring ideas to reality. They’ve worked together on other projects including a shared-use space in Carbondale called S.A.W. (Studio for Arts + Works) which continues to thrive.  

Brooke and Meadows did not want to be the type of people who buy property so they can impose their ideas with no real concern for who actually lives in the community. Their first action was to purchase the building; their second action? Ask the community what it wants and needs.  

“It was very intentional that they were not bringing what they did in Carbondale to Fruita,” said Sarah Wood, a longtime friend and collaborator of Brooke and Meadows.  

Wood continued: “They were showing up in Fruita with an idea that there is a community here looking for something like what they did in Carbondale, but that it would be different and it would be very Fruita.” 

Wood was asked to head up the construction management of the F.A.R.M. project.  

Brooke, Meadows, and Wood asked who the team players of Fruita were and then met with them individually over several days.

Fruita has a lot of creative folks without a place to create. They need bite-size retail/studio spaces, with low enough rent to safely try out their ideas. They need connections to other people also doing creative work. They need exposure. They need a shared central effort. 

Wood continued the listening process which rapidly moved from design to action and construction. Through this process, the acronym F.A.R.M. emerged. It's a tip of the hat to a community whose roots are undeniably connected to agriculture.  

Devan Penniman-Knapp is a letterpress artist, graphic designer, and printer who lives in Fruita. For years she’s been working out of various spaces printing with large antique equipment. She needs space. She needs just enough but not too much. Too much space means too much rent per month.  

Penniman-Knapp said, “I never saw myself as someone who could have a space here [in Fruita] just because there isn’t space…when you look at the two blocks that Fruita is downtown, the spaces are too big or too expensive…it wasn’t something I ever saw myself accomplishing.” 

This is the scarcity in Fruita: not enough spaces to rent for small studios or retail. Even if there is space, it can be too risky for some creators to spend around $2,000 a month for rent when they can’t be certain they’ve got a working (i.e., profitable) idea. These things need a special circumstance and place. In Fruita that place is F.A.R.M., where tenants can get a suitable space for as little as $300 per month.  

There are 19 small studio art spaces and five larger retail units. As planned, the spaces are filling in with the kind of variety and energy Meadows, Brooke and Wood had dreamed of. It is turning out to be ‘very Fruita’ as Wood puts it. 

The construction is on track to be complete by Nov. 26, 2022 which is Small Business Saturday, a nationwide campaign to celebrate small and local businesses.  

Looking from the loft studios down into the nearly completed space, Wood said, “We are just excited to see what happens when everyone comes together.” And so is Fruita.