There is a great book called “How Buildings Learn” and it explores and examines what happens to buildings after they are built. A structure is built to fit a particular need, be it for offices or housing, and, often it is built on a site that requires compromises to fit within the given community. A bakery often undergoes a similar evolution from the it original conception to a bakery that comes to conform to the constraints put on it by its location, its customers, its owners and its bakers. Seven Stars is a bakery in Providence, Rhode Island that has undergone just such an evolution.

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Seven Stars was opened in 2001 by Jim and Lynn Williams. Their search for the perfect location had taken them all over Providence but they finally settled on an out-of-date filling station at 820 Hope Street on Providence’s north side. They made over the building removing the original service bay doors and replacing them with windows. Under the siding they found some beautiful exterior details. Inside they divided the large front area in to two halves separated by a display counter. One side was for the retail area complete with seating and a display area and the other half was the production area with a large brick oven they moved in from New Jersey. A small space in the back was to be the mixing area.



This floor plan worked for a while but Seven Stars was a bakery being run by gifted bakers and it was located in an upper-middle class residential area that had no bakery to call its own up to this point. Seven Stars quickly became the place to go for coffee, pastry, bread, and to hang out. With this success came a problem: they didn’t have enough space; both retail and production. Within two years of opening they were forced to remove the display counter that divided the space and, during the day, set up seating right up to the edge of the oven. Obviously, production was forced into the night hours.



So suddenly they had a bakery with a lot of moving parts. The retail section of the bakery is open seven days a week beginning at 6:30am. At 2pm, while the bakery is full of the after lunch crowd the baker who will perform the mixing duties arrives and starts the dough production in the small area in the back. The retail area closes at 5pm every day but Friday where is 6pm. After closing it is quickly converted over to a production area. At 6pm two more production people arrive: a shaper and a baker. They will work through the night baking the next day’s breads and pastries. A dishwasher and driver arrive around 3am and start cleaning and loading the truck for the day’s deliveries. And, if everything has gone according to plan the space is ready to be reworked back into a retail space when the retail staff start arriving at 5:30am.



As cool and efficient as this sounds Jim says the stress on the bakers is very high. Nobody can miss a step because once the customers start arriving, there is no room for finishing up a couple of late loads in the oven. This begs the question then: who in their right mind would run a bakery like this? It really doesn’t appear to have been a choice. Many a bakery has failed because of a bad location. Jim and Lynn were lucky and persistent enough to find the perfect location. The building was perfect for their original bakery design. But while the physical dimensions of the bakery could not grow the business did (which is a good thing) and the bakery (the business) had to adapt within the constraints placed on it.



Seven Stars is clearly at a turning point and Jim and Lynn are faced with figuring out how to grow the business. They have created a bakery with a regional presence and people from all over New England seek it out. But Jim says they are at the limit of their capacity in both retail sales and wholesale production and are going to be forced to move the production off site. But Jim sees this as a good thing. It will relieve some of the stress on the staff, and they will be able to accommodate a larger retail area. Another huge benefit Jim sees coming is moving the production back to the daylight hours. This carries with it both personal and business benefits. Jim wants to be home at night with his family. But from a business perspective they will be able to supply their customers with bread several hours fresher, and they will be able to offer restaurant customers an afternoon delivery for their nightly service.



They plan to look for another retail space but Lynn readily agrees that finding one as good as 820 Hope Street is going to be difficult but a second location is also one of their near term plans.



All businesses are going to evolve and bakeries are no exception so there is no reason to fight it. Jim and Lynn might have wished for the perfect space that they could simply grow into but I’d bet that the energy that it took to figure out the process of growing their business within the constraints imposed upon them has enabled them to see opportunities that others might have just dismissed as not practical or impossible.