Art Play Cafe opens in downtown Petaluma

“You remember what this space used to look like?” asked Kate Greenspan, the CEO and co-founder, with CFO Elena Kaljian, of Petaluma’s brand new Art Play Cafe. The long-anticipated new business officially opened on Saturday in the Kentucky Street space that formerly housed The Roaring Donkey.

Describing the duo as “two moms on a mission to create a third space,” one where kids and families can feel comfortable and downtown caffeine-seekers can grab a good cup of coffee without leaving Kentucky’s 100 block, Greenspan said she and Kaljian are inexpressibly happy to finally be open, nearly half-a-year after first announcing the innovative downtown eat-and-play emporium.

“It’s been a lot,” she said. “But we made it. We’re here. We’re open.”

Leading a short tour through the bright and colorful, whimsically-redesigned space, Greenspan points out the up-front play area filled with tables, board games and a small kid-sized stage, plus a compact retail corner featuring art supplies and DIY project kits, and several tables and booths of various sizes.

Less than three hours after opening, the space looked as if it already found a number of regulars, as folks of all ages clustered here and there, enjoying a beverage or some lunch. Some visitors had their laptops open, others played backgammon, and some small ones jumped, skipped or spun in circles at the sheer joy of it all. Such magical mayhem seemed primarily located at the front part of the cafe, where a display case showed off a variety of pastries from Costeaux Bakery, bagels from the Bagel Mill, and sandwiches from The Local.

The long lunch counter, Greenspan pointed out, is in fact the original bar from Roaring Donkey, thoroughly transformed into a pristine lunch counter, with plenty of electrical outlets for visitors to plug in their devices while sipping a cup of coffee, which, she pointed out, is from Avid Coffee.

“Coming soon is a lunchables menu, where kids can build their own charcuterie plate, choosing their own meats and cheeses,” Greenspan said. “The whole idea is to be fun, and to be super local.”

While some will certainly find such details to be the main draw to Art Play Cafe, kids are going to find the play room – described on the website as “a dedicated room for interactive, open-ended play for children ages two through nine” – to be an attention-drawing main attraction. With design elements from Petaluma’s Wonderstump that will allow little ones to imagine they are bugs playing under towering mushrooms and painted blades of grass, the Play Room is available for a fee per 90-minute session, and memberships are available.

“The Wonderstump people still have a few elements to add,” Greenspan said. “It’s already pretty cool, but it’s going to to be even more cool.”

The attention to detail everywhere is impressive, from the glowing, multi-colored LED “Art Play Cafe” sign over the counter area to the eye-catchingly rainbow-colored triangles of “light” painted on the wall as if cast by lamps of the same color.

“Everyone is welcome, but this space is really intended for families to come and spend time together,” she said. “We’ll have birthday parties and after school art classes in our classroom/party room, and we’ll have art shows and events and all kinds of fun things.”

All of this exuberantly high-spirited renovation could not have been cheap, but Greenspan says the financial model she and Kaljian developed together has kept any one of them from going into deep debt to build the place.

“We actually have a lot of local investors,” she said. “They are all local families who just really wanted to see this dream come true. It’s part of the magic of this project that the community is what made the Art Play Cafe possible. Elena and I may be the ones who’ll be operating it day-to-day, but this place now belongs to Petaluma.”

Petaluma’s Art Play Cafe is located at 146 Kentucky St. Information on all of its features can be found at ArtPlayCafe.com, or you can leave a message at hello@artplaycafe.com.