Hi. We’re Kyle & Jessica Aster. Over the past few years we’ve been working with a team of local architects, engineers, and designers to come up with something really special for the old Runnels building in South Lake Tahoe at the Y. We’re calling it Aster Station. — a Gas Station for the Future.
But that’s just a tagline. We created this page so you can learn a bit more about the project, and why we're so excited to start construction.
986 Emerald Bay Blvd.
You might know it as Runnels. Or as the old green gas station you see when you get into town. Maybe you remember it as a "auto dealership" for old Volvos. Or just an empty parking lot. Maybe you even remember John’s argument with the city about the VW on the roof. Or maybe you just remember the awning collapsing in the winter of ’23. One thing’s for sure: you know this corner.
What we’re building
What does a Gas Station for the Future mean?
Gas stations take up some of the best corners in our cities and have become little more than asphalt islands of gas pumps and trash cans filled with used Zyn containers. But they used to be so much more! Back when this building was first built, it was a service station — providing travelers with everything they need for their adventure: oil, tire refills, maps, and great advice. We are re-imaging that idea, centered around humans instead of cars.
It means providing you the fuel for your (human-powered) adventure — whether it be a cup of coffee, a healthy lunch, a water bladder refill, or beta on local trails. We want to help you explore all the best that South Lake offers .
And it also means reducing our dependency on gas. We'll have ample solar panels to supplement the cafe's electric usage. We'll have chargers for your e-bikes and EVs available. And we'll have air, water, and bike repair stations on-site. We're super pumped about the future of e-bikes, onewheels, scooters, and all kinds of last-mile vehicles. They're the best way to get around South Lake.
We want to bring all these ideas into a full-service cafe with a massive outdoor space filled with people, food trucks, bikes, scooters, and good times.
Specialty Coffee
Yes, it’s sort of a lame term. But here’s what it means to us: excellence in coffee. Perfectly extracted pour-over. Pleasantly steamed microfoam in your lattes.
In other words: coffee flavored coffee.
Small Plates and Treats
We’ll have a full kitchen serving a limited menu of snacks and small plates. We’re aiming for a collection of protein rich breakfast & lunch items, leaning on the healthier side. But not too healthy.
Fuel for Adventure
We want you to stop in to refill your water on the way from the PCT, tune up your bike before a Tahoe Mountain lap, and grab a quick charge on your one-wheel before heading to the beach.
Re-imagining a classic building
We've always loved the aesthetic of the old Runnels building, and our initial intent was to keep the original building and bring it up to date. Unfortunately, the realities of modern engineering requirements made that impossible. We've teamed up with Aren Saltiel to create a new design that pays homage to the old building and South Lake’s founding mid-century architectural style. And yes, there’ll be a new awning.
We really want this building to be beautiful and to stand out. It should make a statement to everyone coming home and visiting South Lake that our buildings can be just as beautiful as the scenery that surrounds us.
Celebrating South Lake Tahoe
We like to say that we’re bullish on South Lake Tahoe — we happen to think it’s a fantastic place to live and want to celebrate everything we love about this town. Everyone knows about the lake, but not everyone knows about our incredible access to wilderness. We've teamed up with Design Workshop to design an incredible outdoor space that celebrates exactly that.
We’ve designed the site to be friendly for pedestrians, cyclists, and other PEVs (Personal Electric Vehicles) — because anyone who lives here knows how much traffic sucks and how incredible our town’s system of inter-city trails are. We’ve taken advantage of the sunny nature of the intersection and built a plaza perfect for meeting up with friends.
And our favorite feature: as you look out toward the intersection there will be two landscape mounds that mirror the mountains towering in the background. To the left, the top of Heavenly and Monument Peak, following the TRT along the rim down to High Meadows, and back up to Freel and Jobs. We’ll use these landscape mounds to showcase popular trails like the TRT, Toads, and Corral — but also some of the lesser known but just as stunning trails like Star Lake and Cold Creek. We think it's going to be fun to explore our trails in miniature while looking up at the actual mountains where they live.
When can I grab a coffee?
It takes a long time to redevelop in Tahoe. We started this process in late 2021, and it's taken almost 3 years to put together the extraordinarily detailed plans required by the City of South Lake Tahoe and TRPA for a major design review.
We’ve hired surveyors, architects, landscape architects, civil engineers, structural engineers, city consultants, and transportation consultants just to get to the August 2024 planning commission meeting. And none of that includes construction documents. That being said, we hope to break ground sometime early 2025 and expect around 2-3 years to complete the building. But construction is always full of unknowns. So let's call it our best guess.
In the meantime, you can follow us on Instagram for more updates:
aster.station
