Boulder father-son team open ‘music funhouse’ on Pearl Street

BOULDER — Father-and-son business partners Jamie and Davis Maynard are building a gathering space for musicians and music lovers from Boulder and beyond in a pretty unusual place. Not in a concert hall or theater, or in a rock club or radio studio, but in a century-old red brick single-family home on Pearl Street.

The Maynards’ business, Stone Cottage Studios, recently moved to the fully restored historic house at 1928 Pearl St. from its previous headquarters, in an actual stone cottage next to the family’s home on Seventh Street.

Stone Cottage, an offshoot of Jamie Davis’ video-production Magic Factor Media, is a combination of a recording studio, live-streaming broadcast facility, concert venue and clubhouse. 

“We’re really just kind of a music funhouse,” Davis Maynard, the son in the father-son duo, told BizWest. 

Jamie Davis, formerly a biotechnology executive, launched Magic Factor Media in 2011, with Stone Cottage formed roughly six years later. Initially, Stone Cottage provided video- and audio-production services to help musicians develop promotional and marketing materials and build YouTube channels.

“Fast forward a little bit to the pandemic period, and we shifted gears to live-streaming in a safe environment for musicians,” Jamie Maynard said. Davis Maynard was in film school in Los Angeles when the COVID-19 pandemic began, so he moved home to his parents’ basement in Boulder and began working with his dad to expand Stone Cottage’s offerings.  

Stone Cottage’s live-streamed performances are reminiscent of NPR’s popular Tiny Desk concert series, and early shows during the COVID-19 era gave viewers the opportunity to enjoy the experience of watching live music while socially distancing in the comfort of their own homes. 

With the world returning to normal (or evolving into a post-pandemic new normal), Stone Cottage began inviting intimate groups of fans to watch live performances and rub shoulders with the musicians. 

“This new space down on Pearl Street is just bringing so much more collaboration and community to what we had already been previously building before,” Davis Maynard said.

Musicians booked to record and perform at Stone Cottage in March include singer-songwriter Liz Longley, indie-folk-rock band Junaco, and composer and multi-instrumentalist Abby Posner.

In addition to providing space for recording sessions, live-streamed events and small concerts, the new and larger Stone Cottage space features a top floor that has been leased to Crescendo Fine Audio, a Wheat Ridge sound system purveyor that transformed a section of the home into listening rooms curated with high-end audio equipment.

The Pearl Street space is also where Davis Maynard records Echoes From the Stone, a podcast he hosts to spotlight and platform up-and-coming Colorado musicians. 

While the Maynards may find themselves operating a business together as a result of a confluence of several unpredictable happenstances, it’s no coincidence that the pair’s venture involves music. 

“As a kid, I was grateful and privileged enough to have my cool dad bring me to bluegrass music festivals” around the region, said Davis Maynard, a mandolin player in his own right.

“And similarly,” Jamie Maynard said, “my parents were very music-focused. There was always music and vinyl spinning in the house. I grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s, and music was just always part of our family culture and experience. So I started playing guitar early on and singing and writing, and that’s always just been part of me.”

The Boulder area, alongside the broader Colorado Front Range, is home to “a blossoming music community and scene,” Davis Maynard said. “… There’s just so many talented songwriters and musicians” in the Boulder-area scene, which he characterizes as being “rooted in expressing humanity. A lot of people are drawn to Boulder and drawn to Colorado because of the mountains, because of the earth and feeling connected (to both people and nature). And a lot of the music that’s growing out of the space right now is reflecting that.”

As a father and a business business owner, “It’s wonderful to be around your grown kids,” Jamie Maynard said.

Davis echoed that sentiment and said, “I love working with my dad. There’s always going to be trials and tribulations and arguments. But I think the biggest thing is just learning how to relate to business and business conversations, and then how to relate towards fatherly love and family conversations, and kind of holding those relationships in different ways.”

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