By Alixandria Wells-Good

Contributing writer

A ground-breaking ceremony was held on Friday, Dec. 8 for the latest project in downtown Urbana.

The Willman building, located at 215 North Main Street, is set to become a “co-work hub for local small businesses and loft apartments,” according to a press release from the Dayton Development Coalition.

The building, which applied for the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 along with many other buildings throughout the district, was home to Willman Furniture for 87 years. Willman Furniture closed its doors in summer of 2022.

Local developer Jamon Sellman has teamed up with partners for this undertaking, including Urbana’s own Sarah Mackert, who is the architect on the project as well as owner of “WillWork,” the co-working space that will occupy the building’s first floor.

Of course, many hands go into a project of this magnitude.

According to the press release: “This project was made possible by the collaborative efforts of Sellman Enterprises LLC, WillWork, JobsOhio, the Dayton Development Coalition, the City of Urbana, the Champaign Economic Partnership, and the Champaign County Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau.”

Completion for this project is estimated to be within one year.

In February of this year, Sellman received support for the estimated $2.9 million project from the Urbana City Council when he and Mackert presented their plans at a council meeting. Sellman had recently bought the Willman building for $255,000, and at the meeting shared his intentions to revitalize it. He received the approval from city council to move forward with the project and apply for the JobsOhio Vibrant Communities Program and the Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credit Program.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Mackert shared more on the history of the building. She stated that the portion of the building that is three stories was built prior to 1885, and the two-story portion was added after 1910.

Before becoming Willman Furniture in 1936, she said that a cigar manufacturer had occupied a portion of the store front, while a pharmacy had been located in the other portion. She said “the future story of this place must always pay homage to the small business, the local business, and to the Willman name.”

She went on to discuss her process on designing the apartments and co-working space that will all soon be located in the building. Mackert shared they have already found “hidden history gems” since demolition began on the ground floor, and they are hoping to continue to find “architectural details that will give layers of meaning to what we wanted to create here, something catalytic in nature embodied and embedded in the entrepreneurial spirit that existed in Urbana at the time of the original construction, and in the business owners who have since occupied these buildings.”

“WillWork” will occupy 7,500 square feet of the ground floor of the building. According to Mackert, the business model is a hybrid co-working space with the intention of building up new and upcoming local entrepreneurs, and will also be designed to someday be run as separate individual storefronts again. Her intention with the design was to make a space that will have “100 years of life beyond WillWork.”

Richard Ebert, Director of the Champaign Economic Partnership and a speaker at the ground-breaking event, said: “The CEP has been involved and supportive of this project since the beginning. We were happy to help in the process of obtaining the Vibrant Communities Grant from the State of Ohio. We helped partner Jamon Sellman, developer and owner, with a local financial institution for financing on the building and we have assisted Jamon as he has requested.

“We will continue to help support this project through the grand opening and well beyond however we can. It is our hope to support WillWork as they open by being partners with helping connect members and business resources. We are very excited for this project to take shape and look forward to watching as it grows and provides a catalyst for other projects as well,” Ebert added.

Sellman and his partners are working toward the future, while passionately preserving and honoring the past. The building, while needing a lot of work and upgrading to reach its new hoped potential, has remarkable bones, and even more remarkable history and local memories.

Sellman hopes to be a part of the building’s new history and memories, and he is proud that all of the people who are working on this project with him feel the same.

He said that “everyone’s involvement in a job like this has their heart in it. We’re creating storylines in our town. We’re changing things.”

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