An Inspiring Renovation Comes To Life In Joseph

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The first time he saw Joseph, Oregon, Greg Hennes fell pretty hard.

“I'm deeply and terribly in love," Hennes laughed. "It's such an inspiring place for me. From the time I was 15 I wanted to live in the mountains.”

If you live in Joseph or you’ve been there, you’ll know what he means.

"You get a really sweeping view of the landscape. To the south you see the Wallowas. To the north, you look out over the Zumwalt Prairie," he said, standing on the balcony of the 100-year-old Jennings Hotel in Joseph. "As you go further east, you get to canyon country. You get a really interesting cross section of the ecology and landscape here.”

The Jennings is a two-story building with a restaurant and coffee shop on the ground floor and eight hotel rooms on the top floor that were converted to offices, then to apartments before Hennes bought the property. They weren’t in good shape.

Hennes gestured to one of the older units. "The ceilings are dropped to 8 1/2 feet … textured sheet rock walls, which is one of the worst finishes  humans ever came up with ... stick-down vinyl floors.”

Nonetheless, when Hennes saw the building go on the market five years ago, he started making plans. He finally bought it this year for $355,000 and started converting it back to an eight-room hotel and artists' residency.

Hennes is the co-owner of a camera equipment rental business in Portland. He also has a couple of side projects - businesses that make money, and poke a little fun at new vintage style.

One of them, Antler and Company, provides bookshelves, clothes hooks, and mobiles made of — you guessed it — deer antlers. Hennes' other business is Campfire Cologne.

As the goofy, faux-new-age promotional video demonstrates, Campfire Cologne is a little box of sagebrush or cedar sticks. You light it, and waft the rugged outdoorsy scent all over your ironic beard.

"On my first batch," Hennes said, "I literally split and hand-cut every piece of wood. I had no idea if anyone would care. If it worked, awesome. If it didn't, hopefully I made some people laugh."

Go ahead and laugh. These little boxes of sticks are now sold at 50 retailers worldwide, including Urban Outfitters.

While Hennes was able to pull together enough money to buy the Jennings, he turned to crowdfunding to fix it up. He recently raised $107,000 on Kickstarter to help cover the costs of the renovation — that's $27,000 past his initial goal, but less, he says, than the project will ultimately cost. He made it with help from a broad social network of artists and creatives on both sides of the Cascades.  The campaign offered a range of rewards from nights at the hotel, to a rafting trip on the Grande Ronde, to high-end, handmade items.

Hennes has been living at the hotel since winter, doing a lot of the renovation work himself.

The week OPB's State of Wonder visited, Hennes had finished the ceiling and paneling in the first room, and finished the Scandinavian-style sauna.

Lumber for the walls, he explained, was cut to specs by Jim Zacarias, a local sawyer, from an old sawmill he had deconstructed. The rooms aren’t huge, but the new, 12-foot ceilings and tall windows make a big difference.

Carpenter Brian Pietrowski, a friend of Hennes, was in town to work on the Jennings and some of his own wood projects.

"I think we're trying to bring it back to what it used to be after the remodel, still maintaining historical relevance, making it look rustic," Pietrowski said. He adds the project has to make sense in a contemporary context.

You can’t rent rooms yet, but Hennes isn’t waiting to get the artist residency rolling. Christina Mrozik and Zoe Keller were finishing up several months of illustration work during our visit.

Mrozik put final touches on a work featuring two wolves entwined in poses full of implicit ferocity.

"Out here in Wallowa County," Mrozik said, "the wolf conversation is really important right now. I really wanted to make something for the space and the county specific to the 'enviro' conversation, but something that didn't take a side."

For all the work the Jennings demands, Hennes actually has a bigger goal in mind. He’s making preliminary plans to start a folk school in Joseph. He spent time at a low-tech, high-touch school in Minnesota, learning woodcrafts and timber framing.

"A lot of those things are already present here," he said. "There's a local blacksmith, Jim Zacarias, the sawyer. There's a man who makes bows in the county, and tons of people doing fiber arts and weaving. I know something like that can be made here, and I know something like that will be made here," Hennes said. "I will definitely do it, it's just a  matter of time, and finding the right space.”

All the big ideas. All the new stuff. Hennes is confident that he can bring these projects to life without changing Joseph.

"I absolutely do, I think there's already a history of that." Hennes noted the history of bronze foundries bringing new industry and ideas to Enterprise and Joseph. To the extent there's some resistant to change, Hennes said, "This is incredibly prevalent in Portland right now, even for folks who are migrants to Portland. I have little tolerance for that. We're all migrants."

Hennes hopes to get the first Jennings room open for visitors by the end of the month.

This week on State of Wonder, we're talking about the ways rural towns leverage cool stuff in the arts to grow their communities. Check it out Saturday at noon  on OPB for more.