September 27, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Play Café would bring kid-friendly dining to Hill
by KRISTIN PAZULSKI

Chestnut Hill is not known for kid-friendly cafés and restaurants, but in a few years it might see the addition of a restaurant and café that redefines the term.

At the Oct. 4 meeting of the Chestnut Hill Community Association’s Land Use Planning and Zoning Committee, a restaurant/café with a large play area will be introduced that, in concept, could enhance the play and dining experience for both parents and children.

“I’m combining the coffee shop feel, ambiance and décor with a higher-end play area,” said Rachael Williams, the proposed café’s originator and a Chestnut Hill resident, sitting at the Chestnut Hill Coffee Co. last week.

Williams said the play café is different from restaurants like Cosimo’s Pizza Café and InFusion Coffee and Tea Gallery that give kids a small space to play in.

“There are plenty of places that have a kiddie corner, but this is bigger,” she said. “The play area will be custom made. It’s going to be museum quality.”

The Treehouse Play Café, the café’s tentative name, will be a restaurant with a large, multi-floor play area that allows parents to dine and socialize and provides children with a stimulating play area.

The project was introduced briefly at the Development and Review Committee meeting in August, and since then word has buzzed around the Hill about the café. Williams is worried that the community will form opinions about the café before hearing the formal LUPZ presentation. She said she knows a lot of parents who are supportive of the project, but she has heard some opposition.

From unofficial discussion at last week’s DRC meeting and conversation on the Avenue, Williams and her designer, Alan Metcalfe of Metcalfe Architecture & Design, are likely to face two main objections to the project when they present it at the LUPZ meeting on Oct. 4: the addition of floors to the building and the accessibility of wine and beer in a café with a children’s play area.

Williams is proposing to put the café in the former space of Color Me Mine, which left its location at 8524 Germantown Ave. this summer. The building, which has only two floors, will be altered by the property owner, Sanjiv Jain, into a four-story structure with three floors on the street front and four in the rear. A glass-enclosed atrium will face the street on the third floor.

Since the Avenue’s appearance is so important to Chestnut Hill that its aesthetics are overseen by a community association committee, raising a building almost two floors above the adjoining properties is likely to be opposed.

But the loudest buzz is generated by Williams’ plan to get a liquor license.

Williams is emphatic that, financially, she needs the license to open the café and make it sustainable.

Instead of seeking loans, Williams is looking for private investors to finance the café. She’s just begun pursuing potential investors, she said, and already has had one tell her that any investment would be conditional on Williams’ obtaining a liquor license.

The license would allow her to serve beer and wine to customers at the café, as well as serve during catered events for adults (which she plans to do in the upstairs party rooms). She said having the ability to serve liquor during these catered parties is necessary.

As for parents having a drink while their children play or the family dines, she said she does not see her café’s dining experience as different from any other restaurant on the Avenue.

“I don’t see why parents can’t have a beer and wine with dinner,” she said. “The café is essentially a restaurant and people take their kids to restaurants in Chestnut Hill all the time, so I see no reason why they can’t have a drink.”

In fact, parents treating themselves to a drink during play dates is not a new concept.

In November 2006, the New York Times did a story exploring the trend of a mothers’ drinking/play group, and focused on a Chestnut Hill group that met on Fridays.

The article also addresses a woman’s loneliness, when a former career woman becomes a mother. The Friday glass of wine and chatter during the play date helped alleviate that loneliness, said the parents in the article.

Williams can sympathize with motherhood loneliness. A former media executive, cello student and aspiring Realtor, Williams found herself yearning for the café environment even more after adopting her first daughter, Lydia, in April 2004.

“Little kids are utterly adorable and charming … but the dirty little secret is it can get really tedious,” she said, and having a community to socialize with is good for the mother, and permits the kids to enjoy themselves.

Williams did try to start a mothers group, but because of conflicting nap schedules, activities of other siblings and the onslaught of winter (they would meet at an outdoor park) the group fell apart.

“I wanted a community that I could just drop in on,” she explained. “So the café came out of my personal need for that community and also with the interest to spoil myself.”

When Williams got the idea for the café in February, she knew she wanted to open it in Mt. Airy or Chestnut Hill.

She was visiting family in England with her children, and on a dreary rainy day to get out of the house they went to a gymboree-type place, which she said are popular in England. As she was sitting there, she thought it would be nice to have a comforting environment for the parents as well as fun for the kids.

“Those places [play gyms] are not a fun experience for the parents,” she said.

So she decided to pursue the idea herself. The idea of combining the two is not totally unique, and it seems to be growing, Williams said.

“This seems to be a concept whose time has come — in response to the need of parents for a ‘third place’ outside the home where they can entertain their kids, take a break and a little ‘affordable luxury’ for themselves, and find community,” she wrote in an e-mail.

To ease the parents’ experience, Williams and her designers have thought of the little features, such as shelves near the tables for parents to keep bags off the floor. The tables will be custom designed to be lower than the average restaurant table to cater to kids, and they will have drink holders built into the tabletop to avoid spillage.

“All of those details are being attended to, to make it as stress-free as possible,” she said.

Also, no typical coffee cups will be used.

“We’re not going to have sippy cups, but I don’t want the paper cups with hot beverages near the children,” she said, so screw-topped thermal mugs are going to be used.

And she’s not doing it alone. To design the project, she brought in a marketing consultant, a birthday party consultant and a restaurant consultant. Currently she’s looking to add a restaurant manager to her team, to run the restaurant side of the business.

Aaron Goldblatt, vice president of exhibits at the Please Touch Museum for more than 10 years, will be designing the play area.

“He [Goldblatt] knew exactly how to create an experience for kids that is educational and magical, and also safe,” she said.

The design is completely conceptual right now, but the theme is outdoorsy, with a large tree reaching up through the three floors (there will be a three-floor high open space in the middle of the building), real plants “for hide-and-seek,” Williams said, and the highlight seems to be the huge snail she wants to have for kids to climb, safely, on the first floor.

Each floor will have a play monitor to keep an eye on the children and make sure that there are no fights, that rules are followed and — if a situation gets out of hand — to approach parents if necessary.

Williams said, however, that it would not be a play monitor’s responsibility to baby-sit the children. Parents are expected to be on the same floor as their child and to watch their children from the dining area.

“This isn’t a daycare, and it’s not a bar,” Williams said.

The entrance/exit will be gated with a guard manning it. Upon entering, parents and children will be given a marking — likely wristbands — that will match each child with its parent so that a play monitor will be able not only to easily connect a child to its parent, but also to insure that no child leaves with an adult other than the one they came in with.

“That scares me the most,” said Williams, who is a mother of three.

When Williams came up with the idea, the former Yankee Candle Co. store front, currently Penzey’s Spices, was still vacant, and knowing Jain, the property’s owner, she called him with the idea. But Penzey’s was already signed to lease the space so she looked elsewhere until Jain told her that Color Me Mine wasn’t renewing its lease.

With the business plan complete, consultants lined up and a property owner willing to invest in building her space, Williams is ready to take on the Chestnut Hill Community Association’s zoning process. But even if the project moves through quickly, which is unlikely, Chestnut Hill parents will have to wait a few years to relax with a glass of wine while their kids play on giant snail.

Contact staff writer Kristin Pazulski at 215-248-8819 or Kristin@chestnuthilllocal.com.