Loggia

Our campaign headquarters and the Front Porch Project's first project. Loggia is the brick and mortar base for the Front Porch's community-building operations. In its final form, Loggia is envisioned as a 7,000-foot restaurant and café, book and gift store, and event space.

As a dining destination in downtown Austin, Loggia will be open breakfast, lunch, dinner, and long after dinner. Our coffee and teas, in fact our menu, will emphasize locally-grown foods, fair-trade product, and options for the health-conscious. We will serve an array of soups, sandwiches and desserts made daily by local vendors. Space and facilities permitting, Loggia will offer an evolving menu brought to us by our community of the kitchen, a dedicated team of foodies drawn from local artisans and our members as one of the Front Porch Project's many Indaba. In addition to coffees and teas, Loggia will bring Austin and Texas wines and microbrews to the table—another fine product of our local community!

Patricia, the Front Porch Project's business manager, has a long and varied career in retail, and a knack for searching the market and bringing back the rare gems in a sea of plastic for her businesses. Loggia's gift selection will feature many of those gems—gifts that surprise, collectibles of a thoughtful nature, an appealing and completely affordable line of cards, the perfect Texas pecan praline. Gifts that balance the forces of "that perfect, unusual find" and "...at a reasonable price." Like our menus, our shelves will feature sustainable product and the work of local artists and artisans. Giving a new graphic artist her first showing is worth the wall space.

Loggia's book selection will be chosen with an eye toward the kind of conversations we want to build. Books offering commentary on current events, the latest best sellers, a careful selection of new and recent works, practical and sustainable living, ideas for acting in the common good—and of course the work of local authors. We will also offer a wide selection of material on classical and contemporary spirituality, particularly emerging spiritualities and 21st century religious trends. Our deep exploration of these themes and thorough collections of these authors and their works creates a destination for a thoughtful and inclusive spirituality.

We hope that something will be going on every hour Loggia's doors are open. We will have space for groups and meetings—seminars from visiting scholars, recovery programs, yoga, acting classes, bridge, book studies, or whatever you imagined and started yourself. Or join a philosopher, rabbi or professor for an imprompteau round-table discussion and scones. Conversations that matter are the specialty of the house. We will organize regular facilitated conversations in the World Café style, discussions that bring strangers and friends together to collaborate on immediate, current issues or timeless big ideas. Like a forum in Greece, the agora we have in part modelled ourselves on, Loggia will bring people together in dialogue.

Ancient Greece, however, wasn't in the Live Music Capital of the World, and an Austin enterprise has a reputation to live up to! The Loggia stage will be open to local bands, particularly new talent looking for their first opportunity. We will eagerly look for visiting talent for the stage--Will Taylor's Strings Attached, a café sing-along, Sunday gospel music, jazz, open mike readings, local theater troupes, kids who just finished practicing in their garage, Baroque violin, a well-known author--variety (and sandwiches) feed conversation!

Loggia is still a dream, though we're searching for space. Depending on our initial fundraising, we may open in a 3,500 square foot location. Our emphasis on being downtown, close to the heart of Austin, affects our leasing options. If you'd like to help us in our fundraising efforts or in the wide variety of events and opportunities before (and after) we open our doors, visit our Get Involved page, and feel free to browse the Loggia home page for more information.