Entrepreneur Bart Tilly finds fulfillment and a creative outlet remodeling old warehouses
Bart Tilly’s first foray into being an entrepreneur dates back to 1989, when he started selling car phones from the back of his Vokswagen Jetta. He later got involved in the software industry and gained experience in cloud computing, messaging and artificial intelligence.
Tilly and his wife Coreen, also a Wenatchee native, returned to the valley in 2000 so that they could raise their three sons near their grandparents. In 2014 they purchased two of the former Columbia Fruit warehouses that Bart worked in as a teenager. These are part of the North Miller Business Park that had been renovated by local developers several years earlier.
Seeing what other developers had done to old fruit storage/packing facilities kicked off a process of renovating old warehouse spaces that continues to this day. Their latest project is redeveloping a group of five warehouses on Walla Walla St. that previously belonged to Dovex. The complex has been dubbed the Deep River Industrial Park.
Tilly is renovating and sprucing up all of those warehouses, which were structurally sound but needed some fresh paint, bathrooms, entranceways and other improvements. He’s working with the city and various contractors to bring new life to these older buildings.
He relocated Franz Bakery into one of the warehouses, after the bakery had to leave its previous space near Denny’s on North Miller St. because of the Confluence Parkway project.
The most intriguing project in the complex is the redevelopment of a controlled atmosphere storage space that was developed as a cooperative back in the 1970s. Different companies leased space in that facility, according to Tilly.
Tilly has one tenant committed to space in the building — Precision Waterjet, which is owned by Don Stone. Tilly’s current vision for the building is to turn it into what he calls a Builder’s Square — leasing space to businesses specializing in home remodeling so that it might be filled with flooring, cabinetmaking, and other home-remodeling enterprises.
The theory is that consumers could then visit the warehouse as a one-stop shop for key ingredients in a remodeling project. Tilly said there is no guarantee that his initial concept will come to fruition. The nature of adaptive reuse projects in old buildings is that those plans change based on what local businesses decide to do.
Tilly has done some interesting projects, converting warehouse space into storage units, such as the 529 Building on South Wenatchee Avenue. Tilly and partners sold that property recently. He also developed a storage facility in an old CA building up Squilchuck.
More recently, he redeveloped some warehouse space off of 5th Street across from the former Chelan PUD headquarters. One of the businesses there is LUNA Sandals, which is a company owned by Barefoot Ted who is a famous runner highlighted in the book Born to Run. LUNA has a retail presence and a space for assembling sandals.
What Tilly has learned over the years is that the greatest satisfaction comes from building relationships with fellow entrepreneurs and looking for ways to help them achieve their goals. Marketing storage units, by contrast, was not nearly interesting enough work.
Tilly remembers growing up when the family owned Tilly Equipment. Bart has fond memories of making a regular run to Dusty’s-in-and-out for lunch for workers at Tilly Equipment.
His father Earl, a former 12th District representative who later served as mayor of Wenatchee, allowed Bart to hang around the business during summers and after school. His mother, the late Barbara Tilly, was a long time Chelan County PUD commissioner and a powerful force in the civic life of the valley. He remembers learning a lot from his grandfather Vince Tilly, who did some development projects in the valley.
His entrepreneurial itch wasn’t scratched until later in life. He and Coreen started a family and the regular paychecks and benefits that came with working in the software industry were more important in those days.
With the kids out of the house, Bart made the move in 2021 to working as a Real Estate Developer full time.
It was not an easy transition for him to make, but now he sees it as “definitely the best decision,” Tilly told me. There were opportunities for him in this valley with adaptive reuse of buildings that would never have been possible in places like Los Angeles.
What I appreciate about Bart’s approach is that it is based on helping others meet their goals and, ultimately, making the Wenatchee Valley and North Central Washington a better place to live.
