Upward Projects co-founder and CEO Lauren Bailey has built a career out of transforming historical buildings into wildly successful restaurants. Now, she’s turning her creative eye toward protecting the Valley’s waning midcentury structures.
When Lauren Bailey opened her first restaurant via Upward Projects, the Valley-based hospitality group she co-founded with Craig DeMarco in 2009, people were skeptical about her ability to scale the concept – Postino, a small wine bar in a former post office in Arcadia. “Everyone was always telling me, when we were small… ‘You can’t have a lot of these restaurants and have them feel different and do different art and different lighting,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Hold my beer.’”
The San Antonio native and longtime Phoenix resident now oversees more than 30 restaurants in five states, including Windsor, Joyride Taco House and Federal Pizza in Central Phoenix as well as Postino WineCafés throughout the Valley, California, Colorado, Georgia and Texas.
And, yes, each restaurant does feel different – largely because Upward favors old and historical buildings. The preservation and cultivation of such architectural treasures became something of a personal avocation for Bailey as her career exploded – and one that currently lights her fire as more local midcentury landmarks face demolition.
Authenticity is an ethos that carries over to the spaces in which Bailey and her team choose to open their restaurants. The “Upward Block” on Central Avenue and Colter Street in Phoenix features a 1940s-era strip mall that now houses Windsor and Churn as well as the former First Federal Bank building (now Federal Pizza), designed by famed midcentury architect Al Beadle.
“We became really passionate about historic buildings and adaptive reuse pretty early on. There was just something about these spaces for us that always dictated the plan,” she says. “It would be like, ‘We have this building. What are we going to put in it?’ It was the opposite of the way that a lot of people build their companies.”
Her most recent crusade stretched beyond her restaurant group – calling attention to the proposed demolition of White Gates, Beadle’s family home and an emblem of midcentury architecture in the Valley. After an onslaught of petitions and public support, the demolition order was formally withdrawn in April. “These buildings make these neighborhoods special, they tell the stories of these neighborhoods and identify them,” Bailey says. “If you just have a bunch of brand-new architecture, it doesn’t capture the essence of each of these neighborhoods.”
With the help of midcentury preservationist and Modern Phoenix founder Alison King, Bailey organized a group of stakeholders to push for stricter preservation standards. “I just use my network and my community to bring together people who are thought partners that can help figure really complex things out,” she says. “There are really unbelievable people in this community that do a lot of things and can figure stuff out. I think sometimes we just get disjointed when they’re not all together in a room.”
Bailey applies the same problem-solving prowess to historical preservation as she does to managing her culinary empire.
“It is absolutely figuring out how to solve problems, how to handle a certain situation, how to tie something together. In my brain, there’s a creative solution here,” she says. “I think this is the conundrum that creatives find themselves in a lot… We forget that [other people] don’t look through that lens. We see through this lens of like, there’s another way, there’s a third option here. And I love the third option, always.”
