“If you had $200 to surprise someone with a gift, what gift and to whom would you give it to?”
When design blog Apartment Therapy posed this question to its readers, Brigid Barjaktarevic, an employee at First Slice Cafe in Ravenswood Manor, didn’t think much could come from responding, but she posted a comment anyway. “It’s not a person, but I work at a community cafe that feeds the homeless. I’d spend the money on paint and maybe a floor sander,” she recalls.
Shortly after — the week before Thanksgiving — Apartment Therapy’s team reached out to Barjaktarevic, singling out First Slice as a prime candidate for a makeover because of the organization’s mission, which is to feed the needy and homeless with meals funded by its subscription-meal model.
“We really connected with it,” says Apartment Therapy’s executive editor, Janel Laban. “First Slice was built to put good things out in the world — to bring people together. Apartment Therapy is more than just budget and design. The word we’re focusing on in 2017 is ‘community.’ We all know that we can make our homes more beautiful, but we want to expand beyond that, to come together outside our spaces to share ideas and energy. This project is an example of that.”
“This was a first for us,” says Dabney Frake, project editor at Apartment Therapy. “We’ve done rental kitchens before, a bathroom remodel — but it’s the first time we’ve worked with a cafe or a business.”
The timing to get the project off the ground was tight, says Ann-Louise Haak, executive director of First Slice. “We were dealing with Thanksgiving and Christmas orders — it’s probably our busiest time. We had to figure out when we could possibly close the shop.”
That’s where Frake came in. Frake wrangled all the moving parts, from working with partners like Home Depot and Tempaper, which supplied materials for the cafe update, to reaching out to community volunteers. Over three days, Frake and the First Slice team came together to clean the cafe from top to bottom, paint, shop, put up wallpaper and even sew curtains.
Opened in 2009, the Ravenswood Manor location of First Slice has never been freshened up. “Things like paint, wallpaper and sprucing up feel like a luxury to us. How can we find money to do this, without taking away from our mission?” says Haak. But Wednesday, the cafe and Apartment Therapy unveiled their handy work. Fresh splashes of yellow and navy blue paint, white-and-blue curtains, vibrant wallpaper, verdant plants and a few new pieces of furniture give the space an airy, cozy feel.
“It’s awesome,” says Barjaktarevic.
“Ann-Louise and First Slice really trusted us with the design, so this was a gift,” says Frake.
Laban agrees. “We were hoping to find some story out there to inspire people to give a little — and then we find First Slice, which does so much good. How many people, when they’re asked who they want to give a gift to, volunteer their workplace? It was such a great opportunity to give back to people doing so much good.”
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