Want to get hands on with furnishing your place? Have an oddly-shaped apartment in need of some custom-sized goods? Look no further than the new workshop for craft and creativity café Happy Medium, which has now set up at 112 North 12th Street in Williamsburg.

The location was previously home to Brooklyn Brewery‘s canning hall and brewhouse for 35 years. The brewery now only utilizes their tasting room space at 79 North 11th Street as they work to relocate operations to 1 Wythe Avenue at Banker Street. The space joins Happy Medium’s other North Brooklyn location in Greenpoint.

After being on the hunt for more space to hold their full back-of-house operations, Happy Medium secured the new lease in July, which co-founder and CEO Tayler Carraway has called “a total dream.” The location is around 15,000 square feet—about double of their 49 Market Street space in Manhattan—which has allowed them to expand their original plans. What was first intended to only be internal and be used as an office has now also become their home base for woodworking, large canvas painting, and larger home goods-related classes.

One of their hallmark classes is the “Build-a-Chair” workshop, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a beginner-friendly opportunity to work with wood hands on and build custom furniture under the guidance of Happy Medium pros.

“What we had intended to really just be almost like a home office where we wouldn’t even have customers, we now have the space for it. So we decided to turn Build-a-Chair into this Build-a-Home concept,” Carraway explained. “You could truly walk and be like, ‘you know what? I wanna build a side table,’ and then either pick from our suite of things to start with and customize it, or you can come to us with a totally custom idea.”

And while customers and woodworking pupils beautify their own custom pieces, Carraway and the team have decided to keep the actual decor of the space to a minimum, instead opting to leave it relatively untouched, brewing equipment and all, to maintain the original Brooklyn Brewery charm (in fact, music from the brewery’s tasting room can also be heard through the walls).

“We are totally in love with the look of the space. We’re not touching it at all. We think it fits really well with the spirit of what we’re doing here too,” she said. “We’re going to continue to outfit it with things that we may need logistically, but we’re pretty much going to just let it be our industrial expression of the brand.”

If you haven’t walked by in a while, foot traffic is encouraged! More days than not, the gates are wide open to pique any natural curiosity of passersby. Classes are offered a la carte, making them more accessible than most woodworking workshops that require memberships.

Right now, Happy Medium’s workshop is open for event only, including Build-a-Lamp, large canvas painting, and the return of the Build-a-Chair series all in October (register and read more here). In the future, there are plans to open to the public every weekend, and eventually every day, plus host a showroom for their private built-outs and prop builds of furniture available for sale.

And the team is always looking to provide new resources and workshops to the community—if there’s a class you’d like to take, unique piece of furniture you’d like to by, or any other idea, Happy Medium would love to hear it via contact here or on Instagram (linked above).

“New York’s apartments are so specific and everybody has ideas. So what we’re working on right now is what the model looks like where we can truly make our customers’ ideas come to life,” Carraway said.

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