The Showroom on Colville Cracked a Formula for Small Business. Walla Walla Just Funded the Sequel.
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Saturday morning at the Showroom on Colville looks nothing like a car dealership, which is the point. Walk in through the old bay doors at 70 N. Colville Street and you will find Jennifer Clapp slicing bread for a sandwich order at Moosie+Baha, a table of hand-forged ironwork from Artificer Forge next to his mother's jewelry booth at Czyhold Metal Designs, and Peggy Frasse rearranging olive oil bottles at Marguerite Walla Walla. None of them are paying rent to be in the same room by accident.
If you have lived here long enough to remember when this corner sold Pontiacs, you already know the building has a second act. What you may not know is that the city just decided to fund a third act, and it is betting $50,000 that what happened inside this one showroom can happen across several more storefronts downtown.
The building at Rose and Colville spent the mid-20th century as McCallum Motors' Pontiac dealership, then cycled through Ford-related tenants before sitting empty for most of the late 2010s. In 2019, David and Lisa Thompson bought it and brought in Seattle-based architecture firm Olson Kundig to renovate the space, keeping the industrial bones but opening it into the light-filled interior that's there now.
What makes the Showroom worth watching isn't the architecture. It's who ended up inside it and how they got there. The Mill, the specialty food shop co-owned by Clapp, has anchored the space since 2024, working almost entirely with valley producers, down to sourcing its bread from Pane Dolce. When customers kept asking for something more than grab-and-go, Clapp and business partner Esam Ibrahim opened Moosie+Baha next door this year, a European-style sandwich counter named for their respective grandmother and father, serving things like a beef bulgogi with kimchi melt. Down the row you'll find Wild Willow Flower House at the corner of Colville and Alder, and from January through April the building hosts the Persistent Local Market, a Saturday indoor market that keeps local producers and artists selling through the off season.
The tenants describe the arrangement in almost identical terms: they send customers to each other instead of competing for the same ones. That's not incidental to how the building works. It's the entire mechanism.
On June 25, 2026, T-Mobile announced the final 26 recipients of its five-year Hometown Grants program, a $22.8 million initiative that has funded small-town projects across 49 states since 2021. Walla Walla was one of them, awarded up to $50,000 specifically to convert a vacant historic storefront into a shared entrepreneurial space, an explicit attempt to build a second version of what's already working at the Showroom.
The Downtown Walla Walla Foundation held the check presentation on July 11, 2026 at Heritage Square Park, timing it to open the summer's Concert Series so the announcement would land in front of the biggest weekly crowd downtown gets. Foundation executive director Mallory Nash framed the project as continuous with what's already driven downtown's growth, crediting
"the makers, the creators, entrepreneurs and business owners who have taken a chance on themselves"
for shaping downtown into what it is today, and said the Foundation's job now is to make that same path a little clearer for whoever comes next with an idea worth trying.
Economic Vitality Committee member Trevor Kendall was more specific about the mechanics. The plan, called Walla Walla Launchpad, will provide a physical location with reduced rent structures so entrepreneurs can test a concept before committing to a full lease of their own, along with education and mentorship built into the arrangement. As of the July ceremony, the Foundation had not yet announced which storefront the Launchpad will occupy. That detail is expected in the coming months, and the Foundation has an open survey for residents and business owners who want input on what the space should look like.
Plenty of downtowns chase a single flagship tenant to fill an empty building and call it revitalization. What's notable about the Launchpad is that it isn't trying to recruit one business. It's trying to reproduce a structure, specifically the low-cost, low-risk, shared-space model that let Clapp go from The Mill to Moosie+Baha without taking on a second commercial lease, and that lets a metalworker like Benjamin at Artificer Forge sell finished pieces next to his mother's booth without either of them fronting the overhead of a standalone shop.
That distinction matters if you've watched storefronts turn over downtown before. A single new restaurant or boutique is a bet on one owner's business plan. A shared, mentored space with flexible terms is a bet on volume, on getting more people to the point where they've tested an idea with real customers before they sign a five-year lease. If the Launchpad works the way the Showroom has, the payoff isn't one splashy opening. It's several small ones you might not notice individually, the way you didn't necessarily notice Moosie+Baha opening next to The Mill until you were already standing in line for a sandwich.
You don't have to wait for the Launchpad's storefront announcement to see downtown's current version of this energy in action. A few things worth building a weekend around before summer turns over:
Once the concert series wraps, downtown's calendar doesn't go quiet. Wheelin' Walla Walla Weekend takes over Main Street September 11 and 12, with a Friday night cruise starting at 6 p.m. and a full Show 'n Shine from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, plus a raffle, a poker walk, and live music courtesy of 104.5 BOB FM. Walla Walla Fair & Frontier Days follows at the fairgrounds, running September 2 through 6, 2026, with the usual mix of rodeo, the demolition derby, and the Frontier Days Parade through downtown.
None of that calendar depends on the Launchpad. But if you're the kind of resident who already has an opinion about where The Mill sources its bread or which First Friday gallery you always skip, the Launchpad is worth tracking for a simpler reason: it's an attempt to make the next Moosie+Baha easier to start, in a storefront that hasn't been picked yet, by people who are asking for your input on it now.
If you're weighing what a stretch of downtown or a specific block is actually worth to live near, that kind of civic investment is exactly the sort of detail that doesn't show up in a listing description. I keep a closer eye on this than most because it's the kind of local signal that tells you where a neighborhood is heading before the data catches up. If you want to talk through what's happening in Walla Walla or any of the towns I work across southeastern Washington, Camren Jones is a call or message away. Let's Connect.
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