Meet Sierra & Adam, Co-creating Your Community

The idea for Maeve House came from a need for a new studio space for co-founder artist Sierra Bailey. Sierra yearned for a community in her new space, as time spent in a temporary studio space provided the community aspect and a place to work.

At the same time Sierra was looking to relocate, her husband and co-founder Adam Fujawa was ready to shift professional gears. He loved his last positions' hospitality and facility management aspects but wanted to transition away from food.

The two decided Adam could manage the space and handle the day-to-day tasks by partnering, leaving Sierra to paint. They began brainstorming and quickly realized that renting studio spaces to artists had a lot of room for failure. Artists are prone to being messy in their workspaces, keeping odd hours, and not being active in community spaces.

After deliberating over how to create a community, accommodate people working office hours, and keep messiness to a minimum (aka, no paint on the floors), they realized that a coworking space would provide everything desired.

Creating an Inclusive Community

After researching coworking spaces in general and specifically in southwest Austin, they realized that there was a need for such a space. Still, more importantly, there was a need for community-driven events in a third place (a communal space between work and home, such as a church, gym, bar, etc.).

After speaking with a few dozen people in the Southwest community, both of whom are incredibly well-networked and friends who were members of co-working spaces in different parts of Austin, trends began to appear.

The first is that the negative feelings that people currently coworking are that the spaces are cold and industrial in appearance and that the people who rent desks and offices tend to dominate the spaces over those who only need to work a few days a week at a space.

The Southwest community craves a membership-style event space to participate in low-key events like coffee and social meet-ups. Many people are busy caring for children and/or aging parents and want closer-to-home options. They felt isolated in certain ways from Austin and wanted a place to connect and gather.

The third was a space to rent for meetings and gatherings on nights and weekends.

The community's needs aligned with Sierra and Adam's goals, and the idea of Maeve House was born.