The Ravenna Gardens store at Queen Anne Avenue and Boston Street is calling it quits after 10 years in the neighborhood, and it will be replaced by a Peet's Coffee & Tea shop across the street from a Starbucks, catercorner from a Tully's and two doors up from Caffè Ladro.
"Our lease was up," explained Gillian Mathews, one of the owners of Ravenna Gardens. The move wasn't forced on the longtime neighborhood business because of a massive jump in rent, she stressed. "It was our decision."
Some neighborhood sources dispute it, but the store isn't closing because of declining business, according to Mathews. "It was fine." Instead, she said, the company is going to concentrate on its larger store in the University Village and on its store in Kirkland.
"Oh, we'll miss our [Queen Anne] customers," Mathews added, "but we hope to see most of them at the U Village store." Some employees are moving to the University store, and others are moving on, she said.
Store manager Amy Malaki is one of the latter and plans to go to graduate school at Stanford University in California. "I'm going to get an M.B.A.," she said between dealing with customers last Saturday afternoon.
Malaki thinks Peet's will be successful, but she still regrets that Ravenna Gardens is closing. "It's sad to see the neighborhood changing the way it is," Malaki said, mentioning all the condos going in as one example, and the on-again, off-again plans to turn the Metropolitan Market into a QFC as another.
Valarie Sammons, a Ballard resident who has shopped at the store before, was surprised to hear about Peet's as she and her friend, Queen Anne resident Susan Van Kleek, stopped by the gardening business. "That's just what we need: another coffee shop," Sammons railed.
Van Kleek, a regular shopper at Ravenna Gardens, was also less than pleased with news that yet another coffee place was opening in the space. "What makes me go out of the area is all the coffee shops," she said.
Like pretty much everyone in this city, Malaki is a coffee fan, but she goes to Caffè Ladro instead of the corporate coffee outlets at the same intersection. "I like to support the local guy," she explained.
So does Bill Van Winkle, a Ladro regular who was sitting outside on one of several chairs set up on the sidewalk. He was unimpressed when told of a Peet's going in at the gardening shop's old location. "I think it's insanity. That's my opinion."
But Van Winkle doubts Ladro will lose much, if any, business when the new coffee shop opens. "These are loyal customers." If Peet's draws any coffee customers away, it will probably be from Starbucks, he added.
Shuanna Holt, a barista working at Ladro the same afternoon, agreed. "I don't think we have to worry," she said. That's not to say she had anything bad to say about Peet's. Holt worked for the company in Seattle at one point, she said. "It's a good company. Ladro is better," Holt smiled.
A call to Peet's corporate headquarters in California, where the first Peet's opened 41 years ago in Berkeley, was not returned. So it is unknown why the company picked a spot so near other coffeehouses.
But Tasha Cummings, assistant manager at Peet's Fremont outlet, said that store and ones in Green Lake and Redmond are popular. "We've done really well in the Seattle area," she said.
Ravenna Gardens is closing at the end of August, but Peet's is planning to open its new Queen Anne outlet in mid-October, Cummings said. "That is subject to change," she cautioned.
THE PEET'S-STARBUCKS CONNECTION
There's a certain irony in the fact that a Peet's Coffee & Tea outlet is going in across the street from a Starbucks in Upper Queen Anne. Starbucks got its start with the help of Peet's, which trained Starbuck's founders and supplied the coffee to Starbucks in the company'sz early years, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times that is posted on Peet's Web site.
The story quotes Jerry Baldwin, a Starbucks co-founder, as saying Starbucks would have gone nowhere without Peet's. In fact, a partnership involving Baldwin bought Peet's in 1984, according to the Los Angeles Times piece.
But three years later, one of Bladwin's partners wanted to cash out. So Baldwin kept Peet's and sold his stake in Starbucks to a group headed by Howard Schultz, the story states.
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.
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