The Goodrich Mill

The brief

The Goodrich is a 1919 grain elevator in Farmland, Indiana — on the National Register of Historic Places — undergoing a phased restoration. The restored loft hosts private gatherings for up to 40 people. Future phases will open a gathering hall, a mercantile, and a trackside patio. The restoration is funded in part by venue rentals and in part by the Brick Legacy Initiative, which lets supporters sponsor a brick.

The site had to do three things at once: tell the story of the building, book the loft, and route donor dollars into the next phase of restoration. Three audiences, three intents, one homepage.

The approach

The temptation with a historic building is to treat the website like a museum — archival photography, long-form history, scroll-driven timeline. That works for a National Trust property. For a venue that also needs to convert event bookings into restoration funding, it buries the action.

Instead the homepage opens with the architecture — an aerial of the tower at sunset — and immediately offers three doorways: read the story, sponsor a brick, book the loft. Each leads to a flow tuned for its audience. The historian gets the long version. The donor gets the Brick Legacy page. The event planner gets the reservation system.

The restoration roadmap is laid out as four phases — loft, gathering hall, mercantile, patio — so that every visit, even from a stranger, becomes a glimpse of work in progress.

The reservation system

Most of the design effort went here. A venue booking is a different animal from a restaurant reservation or a hotel night: the date, the headcount, the BYOB question, the access details, the address that is not on Google Maps quite right yet. Done badly, this becomes a twelve-field form with a date picker that hides availability behind clicks. Done well, it feels like the venue is already half-hosting you.

The principles I built it on are the same four I wrote about in a separate essay:

• The date picker shows only what's available. The visitor never picks a date that turns out to be booked.
• The price and capacity rules are visible before the form. No surprises behind the email field.
• The confirmation is the first piece of hosting. Calendar invite, BYOB rules, parking note, easy reschedule.
• Every booking is the start of a relationship. The reminder, the day-of details, the follow-up later all flow from the same system, with no one in the business having to remember to send them.

The other half

The donor flow for the Brick Legacy Initiative was the second non-trivial system on the site. Sponsoring a brick is a small, emotional transaction — not the same as buying a ticket or booking a venue. The page is written and designed accordingly: short, plain about where the money goes, with a clear path from "I like this idea" to "the brick is mine."

What I'd do next

As future phases of restoration come online, the site grows with them: the gathering hall gets its own page and its own reservation flow, the mercantile gets a small commerce surface, the patio gets a calendar of trackside events. The architecture of the homepage — one building, multiple doorways — was chosen to make that growth feel like the building's own evolution, not a redesign.