By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter

                Homestead Tiny Homes CEO Matt Crandell plans to transform the old Winn Dixie shopping center in Williston into a multi-use facility with a concert hall, a pricey steakhouse, open-air market, and high-end boardwalk just for starters.

            It’s not just wishful thinking or boasting from Crandell’s perspective.

            He dreams big, he’s got a definite game plan, and he unveiled it to Williston City Council members this week. He used computer-drawn images to show what the development will look like in a few years.

            On his first visit to the old Winn Dixie, Crandell said, he was accompanied by Dave Pieklik, former director for the Nature Coast Business Development Council, Inc., the Levy County Commission’s economic development agency.

            “I said it’s really our goal to make Williston a destination for people coming from outside Williston, not just to build something that all the people of Williston would go to,” Crandell said. “We’d actually bring in commerce; we’d bring in economic revenue. The idea would be that when people talk about tiny houses in the southeast, they would talk about Williston. There’s this little city in Florida. It’s real cool. They’ve got a lot of tiny houses. You can go and stay there. You can go and see what a tiny house looks like and eventually we want it to be a multi-use environment.”

            “It’s really popular these days when you have multi-use environments – apartment living put together with condominium living, being put together with retail, put together with dining, put together with entertainment,” he added.

            Crandell has already created what amounts to a tiny house apartment complex a block east of Williston City Hall. He said his daughter runs the facility which includes tiny houses used as rentals. He said it became a really popular facility after the COVID-19 shutdown when people began looking at Tiny Houses as an alternative to motel rentals. His 18-year-old daughter operates it. The Sad Donkey Coffee Shop is part of the tiny house complex.

            The old Winn Dixie property, which is about a mile away off State Road 121, will have a larger Sad Donkey Coffee Shop, but Crandell said he wants to do a lot more with the property than just a super nice coffee shop. He wants to blend entertainment, restaurants, and retail into one location that is largely open-air and high-end. He thinks it will attract people from inside the state, out of state, and of course Williston, Ocala, and Gainesville.

            “Starting this weekend we’re having an open-air market. We’ve been clearing brush, we’re trimming the trees, we’re repairing the fences. We’ve put down a slurry coating on 60 percent of the parking lot. We’ve put up a tent with a three-board horse fence around it,” he said. “That’s being set up as an introduction to our concept.”

            Crandell said his company isn’t looking to create a small-town farmers market with a few tents at the old Winn Dixie site.

         

   “We want to start by creating a very high-end market. We’re not just talking about a produce market, we’re talking about an artists’ market. We’re creating an environment where you may buy jewelry; you may buy artwork; you might buy just about anything you put in your home,” he said.

            Crandell said part of the plan is to bring two Tiny Home models to the site that people can tour.

            He said not every vendor that wants to sell merchandise at the Winn Dixie open-air market will get a spot in the facility. Crandell wants to be able to choose the vendors based on quality.

            “We felt to do that we can create an environment that was very high-end and then when the vendors say they really want to come in, we say we’re going to put you on a list and we’re going to qualify you because we want this to be special. We don’t want just anything. We want it to be special. We want people to say I’m going there because it’s so nice,” Crandell added.

             “So each stall will have representative products we like to see in the future. You’ll see local honey, you’ll see candles, you’ll see soap, you’ll see produce, you’ll see art, you’ll see woodworking. There will be a lot of everything just so you can get a real solid feel. When vendors come to see us we can say this is what we expect. This is what we can anticipate and they can look at it and say, oh, I want to be a part of that,” Crandell said. “This will eventually end up as a good open air market.”

            Crandell anticipates opening a 2,200 square foot Sad Donkey Coffee Shop at the site that offers high-speed internet.

            “It will be very, very nice; it will be nice for people going to work. It will be nice for people to have a sandwich at lunch,” he said.

            The former Sunshine Drug store at the Winn Dixie site will be converted to a 9,000-square foot concert hall that can accommodate a small country band or headline acts.

            “We can make it a destination,” Crandell said.

            Crandell said there’s a little place just outside of Austin, Texas called Gruene Texas. It has a concert hall that is extremely popular. The ZZ Top band uses the concert hall as a home base.

            “The whole city is built around the concert hall,” he said.

In Williston, Crandell plans to build a steakhouse next to the concert hall.

            “This will be a pretty high end steakhouse. Once again we want to draw people from Gainesville and Ocala to come in and sit down to a $26 steak. We’re not Ponderosa. We really want to be a nice place to come to be able to eat in there and maybe be able to go see a concert,” he said.

            Crandell said the main building has 25,000 square feet of space with a high ceiling (the former Winn Dixie). He said he wants to develop two small communities of tiny house lodging in the building, each with its own theme. Next door, he plans to build a boardwalk of tiny house restaurants that surround an eating area. People will sit at tiny house-style dining facilities surrounded by the restaurants.

            He said the goal is also to bring a “cool out parcel development” that works well with the rest of the property. He didn’t say who he is working with on the out parcel project.

            He said the entire development will make people feel comfortable walking through indoor and outdoor facilities.

            “We want this to be very open. You walk in and it’s an indoor and outdoor type environment. You are comfortable maybe staying in a lodge. You go to the steakhouse for dining and you go to the concert that evening,” he said. “I’d say where we’re at today it’s about three years of work.”

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City of Williston Regular Meeting June 8, 2021; Posted June 10, 2021