Treasure Roadhouse owner Bourn Archer (left) and musician Rhan Wilson.
Somewhere between the apple orchards and the city of Watsonville is a new music hangout. Specifically, on the corner of Freedom Boulevard and Corralitos Road, near the Cadillac Café and Alladin Nursery. Inside the Treasure Roadhouse, beyond a small lobby, awaits a large stage, a large black skull with blue eyes and state-of-the-art acoustics.
“People come in here and say, ‘ooh, it’s really nice,’ as if—I don’t know what they were expecting,” says musician Rhan Wilson, who helped design the space with owner Bourn Archer, who used to own the Aptos Burger Company.
Archer and Wilson will hold a rummage sale at the Roadhouse on Sunday, Dec. 15, as a fundraiser to help the newly opened Roadhouse get through the slow season to the summer. The venue already hosted Rick Walker’s looping festival. And last month a New Zealand performer stopped mid-song to say, “It sounds really good in here.”
At 100 seats, the venue could be considered the South County’s half-sized Kuumbwa. Wilson and Archer painted the theater all black and built a spacious green room that’s actually green. “We’re musicians, so when we were putting this room together, we asked each other, ‘what do you want as a musician?’ ‘Well, I want to have big stage so we’re not all crowded,’” Wilson says. “‘And we need a nice room to hang out backstage.’”
Wilson hopes the Treasure Roadhouse will draw more people to a neighborhood that, in addition to the nursery and Cadillac Café, already has a coffee house and a computer repair shop—plus a meat market up the road and a tap room on the way.
“It’s not that far from Santa Cruz,” Wilson says. “When people hear Corralitos, they say, ‘It’s so far away.’ People drive up to Don Quixote’s all the time, even to Henfling’s, up to Davenport Roadhouse. This is about equidistant for most people.”
