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A Sheltering Place

Tea house becomes a haven for its customers and owners.

by Ann Loftin

On a cold, overcast spring day, good for curling up inside somewhere warm and snug, the open-air Honeysuckle Tea House is jammed with customers. So many cars crowd the parking lot that proprietor Tim Toben ’81 has to come out and apologetically direct visitors to park along the otherwise quiet country road 10 miles northwest of downtown Chapel Hill.

Even in this less-than-inviting weather, dozens of people are standing in line at the pagoda-style building fashioned from recycled and repurposed materials and chatting in pairs or small groups at long wooden tables under the building’s rustic tin eaves.

Tim Toben '81, owner of the Honeysuckle Tea House near Chapel Hill. Photo by Anna Routh Barzin '07

Tim Toben ’81, owner of the Honeysuckle Tea House near Chapel Hill. Photo by Anna Routh Barzin ’07

Toben, quick to laugh and establish rapport with guests, says the tea house is only one part of a project he cares about: creating a sustainable local economy through agriculture. All the medicinal herbs, teas, honey and syrups that appear on Honeysuckle’s chalkboard menu are grown organically here, on 15 cultivated acres of Toben’s 58-acre farm. The sun and wind power the electricity. A Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign launched the tea house, which serves a variety of sweets and savories along with its smoothies, herbal beverages and teas by the cup and pot.

Toben estimates that Honeysuckle — open every day from mid-March through mid-November — has attracted its customers about half-and-half through social media and old-fashioned word of mouth.

Sustainability entrepreneurs talk about the need to serve “the three Ps” — people, planet, profit. Toben has put in a lot of work on the first two, and now he and his staff of 15 are close to the third. Last year, revenues doubled to $200,000. This year, Toben expects them to triple. “At $250,000, we’ll be profitable,” he said. “It’s not something anybody’s going to get rich doing, at least not in the monetary sense. But we have a real richness of community here.”

Toben drafted architect Giles Blunden, who built Carrboro’s cohousing communities, Arcadia and Pacifica, to build the two-story structure. They repurposed materials found on the property: old telephone poles support the building, vertical beams came from the pine trees they cleared away to plant their teas, herbs and berries. They milled the remaining trees into the plank bridge that connects the pagoda to the parking lot. The tin roof came from an abandoned farmhouse on the site. In a past life, the railing beside the tables was the deck on a friend’s porch. They used four shipping containers to make the ground-floor rooms below the serving area, where in winter Honeysuckle staff dehydrate and package the plants they grow. They also make medicinal syrup from the farm’s elderberries, native to North Carolina.

It’s a tranquil place to have landed after the previous high-stakes chapters of Toben’s professional life.

After graduating from UNC, Toben started a database-design and data-mining company, which he sold in 1999 for $175 million. He walked away with a $10 million payout on his original $10,000 investment.

That money helped him bring his next vision to reality: a large-scale environmentally friendly urban development in Chapel Hill. In 2005, at the height of the housing boom, Toben bought a 1.25-acre parcel at Rosemary and Graham streets in Chapel Hill and assembled a group of investors to build Greenbridge. The condo development, with a mix of retail and services, incorporated many green elements, including sustainably harvested wood, rooftop solar panels, solar-thermal heat pumps and roof-top gardens.

Many of the ecofriendly features and building techniques turned out to be more expensive than expected; incorporating a significant segment of affordable units for lower-income residents further strained the economics; and then unit sales stalled in the height of the collapse in the housing market and financial sectors, leading to foreclosure and loss of Toben’s millions in investment. (He tells his story in Lyle Estill’s 2013 book, Small Stories, Big Changes: Agents of Change on the Frontlines of Sustainability.)

But Toben, who studied botany and zoology at UNC, and his family still had the farm. He and his wife, Megan, already were building an environmental nonprofit devoted to sustainable agriculture, The Eco-Institute at Pickards Mountain. Unlike Greenbridge, the institute was free of debt. Flocks of young people came to learn about medicinal plants, heritage grains, flowers and other sustainable crops and techniques, often pitching tents for days and weeks. A few stayed for months, volunteering their labor. The Tobens saw that they could create a like-minded community that would sustain and spread their efforts.

Toben doesn’t entirely disown his involvement with the goals of Greenbridge, but he now calls “the whole growth ethos,” built on creating and servicing debt, misguided. From the tea house, Toben looked down onto a project that better fits his ethos now, his homemade playground, where a passel of small children, including two of his own, can scamper around while the family’s golden retriever fishes for imaginary trout in a child-sized pair of ponds.

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