On the second floor of a building on River Road in Unionville, in space that used to hold offices and, before that, an antique shop, there are going to be shelves of secondhand books and a small cafe that would rather you stayed a while than grabbed a coffee and left. On Monday, June 22, Farmington's Town Plan and Zoning Commission cleared the last thing standing between that idea and an open door. It took one voice vote, and the thing standing in the way was parking.
The business is The Next Chapters Bookhouse, and its own description of itself tells you most of what you need to know about the register it is going for: "Pre-loved books, ready for their next chapter." The plan is used books, sorted into the categories people browse by, romances and mysteries and thrillers and nonfiction and a children's section, plus a cafe, a small gift shop the owners are calling the Booktique, a riverfront lounge they want to rent out for the kind of gatherings that need a room, and author talks. It is, in other words, a bookstore that has thought hard about being a place rather than a transaction.
That came through at the meeting, which is not a sentence anyone writes about a parking review very often. The cafe, one of the owners told the commission, is not the point. They use Daily Grind beans, they plan to open later in the day, and they have made their peace with missing the morning coffee rush entirely. "We're the experience," one of them said, "not so much the coffee shop." The books are mostly for browsing, not seating. The whole thing is built, in their telling, for slow in-and-out traffic, which is a business model The Farmington Mercury is constitutionally obligated to respect.
The parking, since that was the question
Because the bookstore-and-cafe is a new use for the building, the change had to come back to the commission. The space sits in a commercial zone down by the river, and it shares parking with the mini-golf course next door, which the same owner runs and which already sells ice cream and snacks. Here is the part that made the review short: the old approvals on the building allotted eight shared parking spaces, and the bookstore needs four. The owners were asking permission to use less than the building was already cleared for.
The commissioners had the usual questions. No, there is no cooking on site, just pastries warmed up. Yes, the health department has signed off. The neighbors in the building are mostly therapists and a photographer, the kind of tenants who generate one or two cars at a time, not a 4 p.m. rush. By the time the questions ran out, the verdict was friendly and unanimous, delivered with a voice vote and an unprompted prediction from the table that the place was going to be popular.
Why a used bookstore is news
It is easy to file a bookstore opening under "nice, and small," and move on. The Mercury would rather not. The budget votes, the zoning fights, the school board meetings this paper covers all quietly assume a public that still reads, and a habit like that has to live somewhere. A used bookstore with a children's section, author nights, and a room you can sit in by the river is one of the places it lives. Handing a secondhand novel to the next person who will love it is a small thing. Towns are mostly made of small things, done well, by someone who decided to.
The Next Chapters Bookhouse is not open yet. The owners told the commission they are still working through the final building approvals, so this was the zoning box getting checked, not a ribbon getting cut. But a bookstore clears its hurdles the way it sells its books: one at a time, no rush. Last week it was the parking. The shelves come next.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A used bookstore runs on the same quiet faith Farmington Storage does: that a thing somebody already loved is worth keeping in good condition for whoever loves it next. One does it with secondhand novels, the other with whatever you have boxed up, at institutional grade. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's Plan and Zoning Commission long enough to know that the meetings nobody warns you about are sometimes the good ones, and that a parking review for a bookstore is the rare zoning item he would have happily stayed late for. He is on his second coffee, beans unspecified. He has already picked out a chair by the window. ☕
*The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the zoning vote that quietly green-lights a bookstore, the police log that is technically public record but that you would never find on your own, the school-budget decision that shapes what your kids read next year. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology, which makes us natural allies of any business whose entire pitch is "stay a while." Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we mean it. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com, and then go find a bookstore. #WeAreFarmington 📚