WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — A couple of years ago, CraftStudies was in transition.

The nonprofit craft education organization had sold its building in Hanover and planned to purchase and renovate the former 25,000 Gifts building in White River Junction. It was meant to be the start of a bright, new chapter in the organization’s long history, which dates to 1952.

For a variety of reasons, that plan fell apart, but a better one seems to have fallen into place, CraftStudies leaders said this week.

“It feels like it was just kind of meant to be,” Lisa Brahms, executive director of CraftStudies, said during an interview in the organization’s new home.

CraftStudies is renting part of the former Kibby Equipment building at 87 Maple St., across from Hartford Town Hall. The 25,000 Gifts building, which CraftStudies purchased from Listen Community Services for $290,000 in 2021, is up for sale.

“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to make it work for us,” David Allen, treasurer for CraftStudies, said Wednesday. “We hope we’re able to find somebody who’s able to put it to good use.”

The building is in good shape but would have required extensive and costly renovation to meet the organization’s needs.

“We went through a very extensive process with Banwell Architects and Trumbull-Nelson,” Brahms said.

As they got closer to finalizing their plans, “the estimates kept coming in higher and higher and higher,” she said. Inflation played a role, but the expensive renovation seemed more burden than springboard.

“We realized it wasn’t in the organization’s long-term best interests,” Brahms said.

Since buying the building, CraftStudies has had it appraised and the value is higher than it sold for two years ago, but Brahms declined to say how much higher.

CraftStudies officials are talking with officials at the Upper Valley Haven, “but there’s nothing concrete going on right now,” Allen said. “We’re not actively marketing it to other people right now,” he added.

The space on Maple Street became available last fall, after Funkalicious Market and Deli closed and Standard Company, a tattoo shop, moved to North Main Street. CraftStudies signed a lease in December and started offering classes in February.

The space is naturally broken up into three rooms, which suits CraftStudies’ needs. The largest space is given over to pottery. There are seven pottery wheels set up and plans for an eighth. A slab roller, for making tiles and mosaics or hand-building with clay, stands in the middle of the room. Commercial sinks and stainless steel tables that were part of the deli occupy space next to a small room containing kilns for firing clay.

Next to the pottery studio is a smaller jewelry studio, with separate workstations, three soldering stations at a metal table, a TIG welder, grinding and polishing wheels, anvils, a tabletop hydraulic press and drill press and a long rack of hammers.

The third space, where the tattoo shop was, holds a set of tables pushed together and is intended for textile production, ranging from quilting to bookbinding to basketry. It can also host meetings and social functions.

The building’s industrial origins made it easy to set up, and the community of makers and volunteers that has grown around CraftStudies handled pretty much every aspect of setting up the new space, Brahms said.

“Everything you see in this space that looks constructed has been built by volunteers,” she said of the pottery studio.

All told, the three spaces provide about what CraftStudies would have gotten out of the 25,000 Gifts building. The Maple Street building is already handicap accessible and has something the other building doesn’t: visibility, and proximity to other White River Junction arts organizations. Junction Fiber Mill is next door, and the studios share a building with White River Ballet Academy. The restaurants and galleries of downtown are a short walk away.

The organization was able to get up and running more quickly on Maple Street, without having to complete a time-consuming renovation.

“Our community of people who went to classes in Hanover, they were ready ... to get working on stuff again,” Katie Kalata Rusch, CraftStudies’ creative media manager, said Wednesday.

In the longer term, CraftStudies is poised to grow in White River Junction, where it’s already building partnerships with the nearby White River Elementary School, the Bugbee Senior Center and Scale House Print Shop, a letterpress studio in the Hartford Woolen Mill.

“There’s just this spirit of involvement and growth,” Brahms said.

CraftStudies will hold a grand opening from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on June 3 at its new studios, at 87 Maple St., in White River Junction. For more information, go to craftstudies.org.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

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