Dear Steemit friends:
Are you a fan of the hit HGTV show Fixer Upper with Chip and Joanna Gaines? Well then today you are in for a treat! I had the pleasure of going down to review Magnolia Market and I cannot wait to share my experience with y’all! Magnolia Market at the Silos is located at 601 Webster Avenue in downtown Waco, TX. Their contact number 254-235-0603. They are open at the market Monday through Saturday from 9:00AM-6:00PM and the bakery is open from 7:30AM-6:00PM. They are both closed on Sundays. In 2016, Waco was home to a population of approximately 134,000 people and the area is constantly growing! What was once a small town whose identity was know from the horrific situation with David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in 1993, as well as the past and recent sex scandals that have gone on at Baylor University from 2012-present, Chip & Joanna Gaines and their real estate empire has brought a new and positive association with Waco. They have brought hope, joy, and a new brand identity to Waco, Texas like no other.
You can spot the two side-by-side cream colored with slight rust silos from miles away. I was driving on I-35S from Dallas so it is very convenient and easy to locate. If you are fortunate enough to find free parking on 8th street, which I was, you pull into a dirt parking lot. Spaces are tight so I wouldn’t recommend bringing a really nice vehicle. If you are handicap, they have parking available at the entrance out front on 6th street. Parking spaces fill up fast so I would recommend getting there very early! If the parking lot is full, there is free parking offsite and a free silo district trolley will take you from your parking area to the market and runs every 15-20 minutes during business hours. I also saw some local businesses that were close to the silos advertising parking for $5.00 so that you did not have to take the silo district trolley and you could just walk about a block and be at the market.
Admission is free! When you enter the premises from the entrance of the free parking lot on 8th street, there are food truck vendors that outline the outer edge of the entire space. The food truck vendors had vegetarian options, barbecue, homemade ice cream, crepes, a juice bar, pizzeria, gourmet foods, and gourmet popcorn, small watermelons with a straw, sandwiches, etc. Their vendors can vary from time-to-time but they had a great variety of options.
There is a huge open area with a pavilion with covered picnic tables to sit and eat as well as fancy areas with swings and nice benches and cloth covered separate picnic tables to eat at. The lawn is covered in AstroTurf and anyone can throw a football, play corn hole (in the north we call it bean bag toss but in corn hole the bags are filled with dried corn kernels instead of dried beans), or even have a potato sack race with your friends and family! Rain or shine, when you enter the premises off of 8th street, you are greeted with a warm greeting and friendly smile. The employees also offer you free umbrellas to borrow during your visiting time to block from the blazing sun-rays or to protect you if it rains. I visited when it was blazing hot about 105 degrees and it was nice to have some protection from the sun-rays. It was a very nice touch to have for their customers. The bathrooms were located on the side near the parking lot entrance.
On site, there is a seed and supply store that is surrounded by an outdoor garden with herbs and spices growing such as lavender, thyme, oregano, etc. What was neat is there’s a small ti-pi with chairs so you can grab drinks and hang out inside the ti-pi and enjoy your beverage. There was a huge sink area where anyone could use the faucets to cool down which was a fantastic feature on a hot Texas summer day!
There is Silos baking company, which is a bakery, coffee, and pastry store. I saw on Facebook they posted that they were completed sold out of Joanna’s "The Silos Cookie," "The Prize Pig" bacon and cheddar biscuit, and the "Nuts & Bolts" cupcake. So if you want to go to Magnolia Market and get the full experience, I would highly recommend going very early in the morning so that you can try every product. I went at 2:00PM on a Saturday and they were completely sold out of baked goods.
Lastly on site the store was so packed and the products they were selling were absolutely gorgeous! They reminded me of Pottery Barn but they had Joanna’s beautiful designs and special touch to them. Each product screamed her name when you would pick it up to look at it and buy it. What I thought was great is they had a shipping area so if you saw something you liked, you could purchase it and let them know at the shipping area and they will send it directly to your house! This is perfect for anyone visiting from out-of-state so you don’t have to worry about taking your items on an airplane and risk having them broken. Also, if you are unable to make it to Magnolia Market right now, you can purchase items on their website at https://shop.magnoliamarket.com/. I thought her products were a bit pricey, however, it was quality and if you’d like to have a piece of Joanna’s designs in your home, it is definitely worth it. Besides items for your house, they also sold their famous Waco t-shirts that Joanna wears on the show for $26.00 USD plus tax, and Chip’s famous Magnolia Farms hat that he wears too for $24.00 USD plus tax. I thought that was wonderful to be able to buy the same clothing items that Chip & Joanna wear on the show.
What I was surprised to find out was that the silos are empty. I thought that they would have been re-purposed and they would open them up to have something like an HGTV museum with clips of the show. For example, they could have items in glass cases or have tangible tables or chairs of the designs that craftsman Clint Harp makes from the TV show. To enable people to be able to walk through and see, touch, and feel items and watch clips from the show would have been really cool. They could go over the history and story of Chip and Joanna Gaines since they’ve been established since 2003 as well as items from a few of their house renovations from Fixer Upper. To know that the silos are just for design and absolutely empty was a huge disappointment to me. If they decided not to put a museum, opening the silos up and having more tables and a line dancing area for local bands to play country music would be perfect too. Since there are food truck vendors onsite, they are capable of serving thousands of people, this would be a really neat feature to have and tie the entire Magnolia Market experience together.
The bathrooms were located on the side near the free parking lot entrance on 8th street. The restrooms are extremely small and when you have 35,000+ visitors per week, having only 3 bathroom stalls in the women’s restroom was very challenging. Although I do not have a child, since there were so many young children there, it would be nice for Magnolia market to add changing tables for mothers in the women’s &/or men’s bathroom. I saw a few who had to go back to their cars in the blazing heat to change their children or they had to change them on the picnic benches or even on the picnic tables. The worst was that some just laid their children down on the lawn and they have to be extremely careful that no one trampled on their child while they were changing them. So adding changing tables would be ideal for their guests. The wait to utilize the bathroom was very long and the space was extremely tiny. So I would recommend that they increase the bathroom sizes for their guests, as the men’s restroom appeared to be about the same size as well. The only positive experience I had with the bathroom is that it had Joanna’s signature subway tile throughout.
My review overall, Magnolia Market is extremely uplifting and very cool to visit. They have speakers that play music through the buildings and outside. They play modern worship music as well as modern day hits with uplifting positive messages. It is perfect place for the entire family as well as a place for people of all ages. I would highly recommend that if you’d like to visit, that you go sometime in the fall I would say sometime in October when the weather is cooler and when the temperature hovers around 80 degrees at the hottest point. Plus you could also drive across the street during football season and watch a game at Baylor University’s enormous new stadium! There truly is something for everyone at Magnolia Market! Young, old, and in the middle, it is a place where all can unite and have fun. And it is definitely a perfect place for the locals to hang out too. When you think of what Texas would be like, Magnolia Market is the epitome of the true Texas spirit and what Texas is all about. With the growth, there are not many places that are still like this but fortunately, Waco is still one of those places. I would highly recommend a visit the next time you are in the Dallas or Austin area. It is only about a 2-hour drive south of Dallas on I35-South and only an hour and a half north of Austin on I35-North. The location is just perfect. There is also the Waco zoo, Magnolia Realty, the Magnolia house, and Chip & Joanna’s home. I will be sharing more of these bonuses plus I saw the site and memorial where the Branch Davidians incident took place, as I will be discussing in my next several posts so stay tuned! :-D For more information on Magnolia Market at the Silos, feel free to check out their website at https://magnoliamarket.com/silos/
