In Virginia Beach, Robert Barnuevo is strolling around the house he and three partners have spent a year building.
Here, he says, is the kids’ play area. Here is the e-gaming. Here are the escape rooms, the “lawn” with ping pong tables and foosball and cornhole, the party rooms, the disco balls and flashing strobe of two roller rinks.
And here is the wall where three fast-casual restaurants will soon be, serving a dozen kinds of wings, rolled ice cream and bubble tea, pizzas and burgers and hot dogs and lumpia. Next to that, the taphouse where parents can grab a beer or a glass of wine while the kids launch themselves at the walls.
The Sk8 House, at 600 S. Lynnhaven Road in Virginia Beach, is designed to be 27,000 square feet of fun. And it’s ready to open, Barnuevo says. The restaurants are still pending, but the rink and games were ready for a grand opening in March.
“Skates are ready to go. Playing around is ready to go. Outdoor fun and games are ready to go,” Barnuevo says.
The room, indeed, already looks polished.
The full-sized rink is an 8,000 square-foot oval with two video projectors, chandeliers of dangling string lights, and a wall-length Virginia Beach mural by artist Jas Oyola. The day-glo tangle of the jungle gym looms expansively next to cafe benches for an outpost of York County’s Column 15 Cafe. The chairs and screens of the eSports lounge sit at the ready.
But then came the coronavirus pandemic, which shut down public indoor entertainment of all kinds.
And so now instead of celebrating its grand opening, the Sk8 House stands vacant — a hall of fun where no fun can be had.
“Is it a bummer that we weren’t able to open? Yes, obviously,” Barnuevo says. “We were excited to open, and there are a lot of people that are wanting us to open. But obviously, we want to look out for the best interests and the health of the public as well.”
Instead, Barnuevo and his partners are re-imagining the space for the requirements of a new world: installing sanitizer dispensers and spacing out their dining tables.
“We want to play it safe. We want to make sure that everybody is taking precautions, we’re able to keep this place clean, and when everything’s ready to go, then we can welcome the people in here,” he says.
Much lengthier delays have beset the partners’ other grand plan: the long-awaited Granby Station food hall in downtown Norfolk, a two-year endeavor delayed significantly by construction difficulties, including an old building Barnuevo says was in worse shape than they expected.
But now, says Barnuevo, they have to rethink their plans for that project as well: Can they really pack diners into a food hall with 13 restaurants? How will that work in the new world that began just two months ago?
“Right now that’s been put on pause, and a lot of that has to do with the COVID,” he says. “I still think a food hall is a really good idea, but with this pandemic we’re having to rethink a lot of things. We have to be more conscious about how people interact. In the beginning, the idea was bringing people together through the power of food: We had community seating. Now we have to reconfigure that so we’re not putting people in harm’s way when it comes to interacting.”
But Barnuevo is still confident that when restrictions lift, and when it’s safe, people are desperate to come out and do something fun again. “I don’t want to say they’ve been trapped, but people have been cooped up for weeks,” he says.
Until then, he awaits an uncertain future, dependent both on the spread of the coronavirus and the government’s response.
“When it’s nice outside, we have our doors open and people pop their heads in, ” Barnuevo says. “They want to know when we’re going to open. And of course we don’t have an answer.”
Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com
