The Crozet Mudhouse – Coming Soon

The Mudhouse, coming soon to The Square in Crozet, aims to become Crozet’s “meeting place.” Many are familiar with the Mudhouse – the original location on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall and their “branch” locations in the Markets around town.

We are about to join the ranks of areas around Charlottesville boasting our own Mudhouse. Humbly boasting heart pine floors which were reclaimed from an old mill in Rome, Georgia that warm up the space, eventually there will be live music in this great historic building with “great bones” and a “great flow.”

From Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, The Story of Success,

What Wolf began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location. It had to be Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. …

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were — that is, our genes. it depended on the decisions we made — on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.

That’s not a bad goal for a local coffee shop to have.

It will be a place to see neighbors and to experience “fluid social interaction, meet family, friends, colleagues” … and to enjoy a good cup of coffee. Or a snack. Or some live music.

The Daily Progress noted the coming coffee boom … and it’s about to start.

Every place needs spaces to help define what they are and John wants this Mudhouse space to be this place – the community place for Crozet. Personally, I am really looking forward to it.

Update 28 May 2009: A reader asked via email whether the Mudhouse would be smoke-free. John affirms that they have always been and always will be smoke free.

Part II of the Crozet coffee boom coming Tuesday.

Transcription:

Hi this is Jim Duncan and we’re here in the Mudhouse in Crozet. When I pulled up this morning on my bike I noticed you had the Outliers pages from Malcolm Gladwell’s book all on the outside of the Mudhouse and I’ll take a shot of that in just a minute. But I’m curious John, why did you put that out there?

John Lawrence: We put it out there because when I was first reading it, the point of the chapter is that the community that the people live in directly relates to the health, the physical, psychological, and emotional well-being of the people there and the connections that they make with each other. So that’s how we see Crozet and it just seemed like the perfect thing. That’s our hope for this coffee house and what it can mean to Crozet.

Jim Duncan: Cool! Thanks very much!

John Lawrence: Sure.