Soon, the pristine Mineral Lake — towered over by dense evergreens and Mount Rainier — won’t be the only attraction to the northeastern Lewis County town.
In the coming years, folks will come from far and wide for weddings in the Mineral Schoolhouse.
The building was recently sold to new owners, Lisa and Brian Franchini, who plan to remodel the gymnasium as a wedding venue.
The building was first established in the early 1900s before it was burned and rebuilt in 1947. It was previously owned by Jane Hodges, the head of a nonprofit artist residency program. The residency, titled “Mineral School,” will continue to be run out of the building a few months per year.
The “Mineral Schoolhouse,” as the new owners have titled their business, will be run with event planner KaDeana Roland as an Airbnb/wedding venue that, according to Lisa Franchini on Facebook, is meant to be a “bride and groom’s dream location.”
On Saturday, the new and previous owners were present at the building for an open house tour, where renderings of the architectural changes to the gym were showcased.
Hodges said she was excited the building would be utilized to its full potential and that she couldn’t keep up with the costs and effort to maintain it.
“A school was not built to be a profitable commercial building,” she told The Chronicle. “(It is meant to be) supported by tax dollars and levies and all those mechanisms. … There needs to be someone who knows how to run it really well.”
