How North Central Washington’s studios, kitchens and gathering places are building more than art and business.
There are a thousand ways to introduce someone to Wenatchee.
You can point toward the Columbia River as it bends around the city, the orchards climbing the hillsides or the Cascade peaks rising beyond them. You can send visitors to Pybus Public Market or tell them to catch a summer concert in the park. But many locals have developed a simpler ritual.
They stop at the corner of Wenatchee Avenue and First Street.
Stretching across the side of a downtown building, Sara Hasslinger’s “Greetings from Wenatchee” mural has become one of the city’s visual signatures. Families gather there for graduation photos. Apple Blossom visitors stop beneath its towering letters. It appears in social media posts, tourism campaigns and local news stories, quietly becoming one of the images through which the community introduces itself.
The mural celebrates Wenatchee’s orchards, rivers, mountains and outdoor recreation.
Its creator sees something more.
“I’m a people weaver,” Hasslinger said.
Spend an afternoon with her at Artworx, the collaborative arts space she founded just around the corner, and the meaning becomes clear.
Artworx doesn’t feel like a traditional gallery. Visitors enter through a storefront shared with local businesses before wandering into exhibition spaces where finished paintings hang beside handcrafted gifts, vintage clothing and locally made goods. Beyond them are working studios, where paint brushes rest in jars beside half-finished canvases, tubes of color lie scattered across well-used tables and tomorrow’s projects wait wherever there’s room to set them down.
The building feels less like a destination than a workshop in constant motion.
Artists drift between studios. Visitors stop to ask questions. Someone pauses over a display of handmade cards before striking up a conversation with the person who made them. Another wanders in expecting to browse artwork and discovers a class underway deeper inside the building.
Nothing in Artworx seems designed to keep people apart.
“I think art is the grease in the gears,” Hasslinger said. “It can be applied to everything.”
That philosophy reaches well beyond the paintings hanging on the walls.
Over the past year, Artworx has become a place where artists share ideas, nonprofits discover creative partners, community workshops introduce new makers to unfamiliar skills and collaborations begin almost by accident. What starts as a conversation over a canvas sometimes becomes a public mural, a shared exhibition or a project neither person expected when they walked through the door.
For Hasslinger, those moments matter just as much as the finished artwork.
The mural outside may be one of Wenatchee’s most recognizable images, but the connections formed inside Artworx are the work she’s just as proud of.
A short walk north, another creative space is built around much the same idea. It isn’t just walkable. It feels connected.
The sounds change before anything else.
The quiet conversations of the studio give way to mixers, ovens and the rhythm of hands shaping fresh bagels. Stainless steel worktables replace easels. Through the back doors, the bustle of the kitchen opens onto a garden where herbs and vegetables grow beside flowers, a small bridge crosses a koi pond and a long community table waits beneath strands of lights for the next celebration.
At first glance, Wenatchee Downtown Kitchen couldn’t seem more different from an artist’s studio.
Look a little closer, and the resemblance becomes impossible to ignore. Stretching across two walls of the gathering space, another of Hasslinger’s murals overlooks the room where entrepreneurs test recipes, guests celebrate milestones and new businesses begin to take shape. It feels perfectly at home there, another reminder that in Wenatchee, creative worlds have a habit of overlapping.
Barb Andre-Van Lith, owner of Ring-a-Bell’s Catering and Wenatchee Downtown Kitchen, sees no distinction.
“One of the things I’ve learned is that food has a unique ability to bring people together,” she said. “When people gather at an event they’re often in a celebratory mood and generally happy to share some good eats. Food is a natural catalyst that inspires great conversation.”
“One of my favorite moments is when a taste evokes that nostalgic feeling of a childhood memory,” she said. “I’ve seen meals inspire tears, turn strangers into friends and bring families back together.”
That experience shapes the Downtown Kitchen every bit as much as the commercial equipment inside it.
Andre-Van Lith smiles as she talks about the garden, where herbs and vegetables eventually find their way into the kitchen and guests linger beside the koi pond long after dinner has ended. Many still remember the years when the property was home to The Cellar Cafe. Others are discovering it for the first time.
Ring-a-Bell’s Catering still operates from the building, but Andre-Van Lith has begun imagining something larger. The commercial kitchen gives emerging food businesses an affordable place to grow before investing in storefronts of their own. The garden hosts celebrations and community gatherings. Guest chefs, cooking classes and live music all fit naturally into a place designed to bring people together.
“If Ring-a-Bell’s Catering is about serving people through food,” she said, “the Downtown Kitchen is about helping create opportunities for others to pursue their own dreams.”
Andre-Van Lith talks about cooking the way many artists talk about creating.
“For me, the creative process is an adrenaline rush,” she said. “It usually starts with an idea… Then I head into the kitchen and start experimenting.”
Not every experiment succeeds.
“The reality is that many ideas don’t work the first time,” she said. “Some are complete failures.”
The failures don’t discourage her. They become part of the process.
“I keep tinkering, adjusting and refining until it comes together,” she said. “There’s a thrill in taking something that isn’t working and continuing to finesse it until it becomes something special.”
Swap recipes for paint, flour for pigment, and Andre-Van Lith could almost be describing the artists working a few blocks away at Artworx.
The same spirit shows up throughout the valley.
On summer evenings, music drifts across the grass of Memorial Park, Lincoln Park and Centennial Park while children dance near the stage and neighbors unfold lawn chairs beneath the trees. At Pybus Public Market, winery lawns, breweries and community festivals, ordinary gathering places briefly become concert venues before returning to everyday life the next morning.
Those transformations aren’t limited to music.
Once a month, Bushel & Bee Taproom trades its usual rhythm for LitMic, where many of North Central Washington’s strongest writers gather to share new work. On one recent evening, Washington State Poet Laureate Derek Sheffield stood before the crowd, evidence that a place built for conversation over cider can just as naturally become a home for poetry.
Those performances aren’t separate from the story unfolding inside Artworx or Wenatchee Downtown Kitchen. They’re another expression of the same instinct: creating spaces where people don’t simply consume art, food or music, but encounter the people making it.
Whether the gathering begins around a stage, a table or an easel, the invitation is remarkably similar: come in, stay awhile and make something together.
That same progression is beginning to shape entire neighborhoods.
Walk through the Trades District in East Wenatchee and the smell of freshly roasted coffee reaches you before the front door closes behind you. Bread cools on racks at Heirloom Baking Co. while visitors wander toward the sound of music spilling from Cascadia Taphouse. Nearby, Lilies of the Valley gives floral arrangements from weddings, memorials and other events a second life, redesigning them for delivery to hospitals, nursing homes and care facilities throughout the valley. A few doors away, a craftsman slowly transforms steel into custom motorcycles.
Each business is different.
Together, they tell the same story.
Originally envisioned by the Chelan Douglas Regional Port Authority as an incubator for emerging businesses, the district has become a place where entrepreneurs work beside one another instead of in isolation. Earlier this year, attendees at Flywheel, North Central Washington’s annual gathering of entrepreneurs and investors, toured the Trades District to see the region’s startup ecosystem in action before returning to pitch their own ideas.
As businesses grow into permanent homes elsewhere in the valley, new entrepreneurs move into the spaces they leave behind, creating a cycle designed to keep new ideas moving forward. The district’s next phase will expand that vision, but its success is already measured by more than occupied storefronts. Like Artworx and Wenatchee Downtown Kitchen, it has become a place where making is strengthened by proximity, conversation and collaboration.
Seen separately, the three spaces appear to have little in common. One is an arts collective, another a commercial kitchen and the third a business incubator.
Spend time in each of them, though, and the distinctions begin to soften.
Artists become mentors. Chefs become entrepreneurs. Business owners become collaborators. A mural finds its home inside a kitchen. A commercial garden becomes part of an event venue. A former industrial district fills with coffee, bread, music and handmade goods.
Perhaps communities have always thought of art and entrepreneurship as separate investments.
Here, they increasingly feel like the same one.
The places themselves are different. The impulse behind them is remarkably similar.
Whether someone is mixing paint, shaping dough, writing a poem, roasting coffee or sketching the first plans for a new business, the work almost always begins the same way: with an idea, a willingness to make it real and a community willing to make room for it.
In North Central Washington, those rooms are becoming easier to find.
They look different from one another. A studio. A kitchen. A park. A cidery. A warehouse.
But they keep offering the same invitation:
Come in.
Stay awhile.
Make something.
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