By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
A couple rehabilitating a 52-acre farm in the Yachats River valley wants to turn the former Beulah’s and Landmark restaurant property in downtown Yachats into a farm-to-market store next year.
Emily and Paul O’Neill are working with designers at Portland State University to see how to best build on the property at the corner of U.S. Highway 101 and Ocean View Drive overlooking the Yachats River bay. They expect the design process to take at least a year and hope to begin construction in 2022. A website to detail their plans and progress is called Yachats Farmstand.
They purchased the property last June from Pat and Suki Miller of Yachats, who had demolished the long-closed and decaying former restaurant building in 2018 with the idea of developing it themselves.
“Most people would do the obvious – build condos,” said Paul O’Neill, while acknowledging that whatever is done “will be a challenging build” because of the highway on one side and the Yachats River on the other.
“I never thought about it until they tore it down,” said Paul O’Neill. “We wanted to save the block. We’re going to do something different.”
Emily O’Neill was studying architecture at PSU in 2019 when she met Sergio Palleroni, the director of the university’s Center for Public Interest Design. Palleroni just happens to have a second home in Yachats and was aware of the Landmark property.
Now they are working with a graduate student at the center who will figure out property lines, building restrictions, and then engineer and design a structure out of all-natural materials.
“It was perfect,” Emily O’Neill says of the connections with PSU and Palleroni. “We’re trying to re-imagine the farm stand for a small town.”
But first, there’s a lot of other work to do.
Looking for surf and land
Emily and Paul O’Neill met in 2015 in Bend. He was in construction, flipping properties during the housing slump that started in 2008, and she was a partner in the Bend Academy of Art, which offers courses and workshops in all facets of art.
“We had a small amount of money that we used to ride the real estate boom,” Paul O’Neill said of their financial backing. And then, Emily O’Neill said, they decided “let’s do a farm.”
“I wanted wilderness and he’s a surfer,” she said.
“We wanted to be close to a cool town … and we wanted more than 10 acres,” he said.
They were staying a few months in Pacific City when they heard about property up the Yachats River.
“We fell in love with it immediately,” Emily O’Neill said.
What they bought in 2017 was a run-down piece of farm and timberland six miles upriver that was once owned by members of the Free Souls motorcycle club.
“The property had been neglected for the better part of a decade,” Paul O’Neill said.
For much of the past four years they’ve been restoring 20 acres of land for growing crops, putting up greenhouses, tearing down an old barn, fixing up a rundown house for office and possible living space, and erecting a 8,600 square foot metal warehouse purchased from a Vancouver, Wash. golf course that was closing.
The goal for the farm is to make it self-sufficient with water and eventually operate the property off the grid.
After several years of study, getting advice and seeing which crops thrived in the soil and the upriver environment, the couple said it was time to find a place to market them in conjunction with a community-oriented building that could offer other things like books, coffee and a place to gather. They kept their eyes open for property, considered the former Alder restaurant when it went up for sale, then jumped at the Landmark site when it came on the market.
The year of finding what works
This year is the year of trying things out.
The O’Neill’s are having a food trailer built they plan to set up in June on property in downtown Waldport owned by friend and builder Louie Cole. It – already called “Radical Radish” – will serve as a small learning lab to help determine what it takes to staff, order and sell food and bring theirs’ and other’s fruits and vegetables and meats to market.
“It will help us get an idea of what we can come from our farm and what needs to be supplied … all as locally as possible,” Paul O’Neill said. “Launching in Waldport is essential to success in Yachats. It’s a big learning curve. Having a food truck in Waldport is the perfect test.”
In the meantime, plans for the Yachats building should be taking shape.
The O’Neill’s are unsure of what the size of the building will be, leaving that to the graduate student to figure out. They should be able to make use of the sloping lot for a lower and upper level. They want to preserve the view with a minimal footprint.
“We see the view as one of its major strengths,” said Emily O’Neill.
She wants the building to incorporate the openness of a farm stand, with possibly other elements of prepared foods, coffee, books and a gathering or education center – and changing and adapting ideas and concepts to what eventually does and doesn’t work.
“We always wanted a community and ecologically based business,” Emily O’Neill said. “And we think this is it.”