Making Space at The Alcove in Providence

A book club room, designed with a distressed French apartment feel, anchors The Alcove’s second floor. Photography by Angel Tucker

There’s nothing exceptional about the built-in banquette tucked into the corner of The Alcove, the new feminist cultural center in Providence.

Until you sit in it.

“I’ve seen women sit on that bench, and they put their feet on the ground, and they go, ‘Oh!’ and then the tears come. I never realized how emotional it was for women to feel like they fit into furniture,” says Anne Holland, a founding board member.

Like most of the seating inside The Alcove, the banquette is scaled to fit women five feet, four inches tall. So when you sit in a chair, your feet don’t dangle. They find the flooring, and you feel like you belong. You fit.

The sunny atrium features verdant foliage, velvet sofas and playful pom-pom lightshades made by designer Pernilla Bergquist (a sage green Lily Juliet bowl is from Stewart House in Providence). Photography by Angel Tucker

That’s not accidental. The Alcove, which opened in January on Broadway, is a space for women and gender expansive people to form connections and community, with events and exhibits, a gallery and library space for members and nonmembers. Women played an integral role at every stage of the process to turn the one-story former religious supply store into a two-level community hub full of color, joy, connections and culture.

Architect Charlotte Breed Handy of CBH Architect LLC designed the building, with its airy spaces and iron-wrought exterior, while Pernilla Bergquist of Pernilla Interiors worked with The Alcove’s design committee and Executive Director Amanda E. Strauss to wrap each room in playful touches of Scandinavian color and whimsy. Each room has a theme.

On the first floor, the first room visitors enter is a gallery — one of the world’s only permanent portrait galleries dedicated to women and gender expansive people, Strauss says.

“Even if you’re at the National Portrait Gallery, only up to 25 to 30 percent of their collections feature women. Women have been underrepresented in portraiture, and therefore our accomplishments haven’t been written into the visual record,” she says.

The current exhibit — “Founders and Inventors Who Shaped the World” — pays homage to women’s ideas, activism and inventions. Gertrude I. Johnson and Mary T. Wales, the founders of Johnson & Wales University, are represented, as are forty others. The show runs through the end of 2026. Innovative materials like cork flooring and reverberation-suppression drywall cut down on echoes in the spacious area to help foster conversations.

An adjoining library holds biographies and memoirs of noteworthy women, divided into sections, with soothing green shelving and walls softening the space. Two moss-green velvet armchairs are artfully arranged before the fireplace, welcoming conversation. It’s one of the many seating nooks scattered throughout the building adorned with luxe fabrics and bright, embroidered pillows, many handmade by Bergquist.

Many of those nooks were imperiled when President Trump’s tariffs hit imports and the prices for commercial seating and decor skyrocketed. Bergquist pivoted, purchasing local vintage pieces with good bones and choosing jewel-toned, commercial-grade fabrics to reupholster them with. In the end, the pieces all work together, giving the space an eclectic, chic and vintage look.

The vibrant boardroom features a cozy conversation nook and ample sunshine, with Roman shades by a South African designer; one of the space’s sleek bathrooms, with arresting artwork. Photography by Angel Tucker

Members’ spaces — a lush atrium, board room, kitchen and elegant book club room — are located on the second floor.

The verdant atrium space is fringed with potted plants and trees, with teal, green and indigo velvet sofas matching hues pulled from the paintings on the walls. It was one of the most challenging rooms to design, Bergquist says.

“That has been the room that created the most stress for us,” she says. “To create a garden haven in the middle of a building, and to make it really feel full of plants and dark and moody, was challenging.”

A bright boardroom echoes a 1970s Swedish living room, with pops of orange carpet and pillows, with rattan chairs and cobalt Roman shades providing counterbalance. But it’s the lofty book club room that steals the show on the second floor. It’s done in dusty pinks and golden velvets, with touches of burnished brass and photographs and paintings of women smiling down from all angles. A vintage rug scored through with pink was a last-minute find that ties the room together: Bergquist and Holland found it online, with Bergquist driving to New York City the next day to retrieve it, rolling it into place a mere six hours before The Alcove opened its doors.

The library focuses on biographies and memoirs of notable women. Photography by Angel Tucker

Just a few small landscaping touches to the building’s outdoor garden and second-floor patio spaces, and the space will truly be finished. The entire project, from conception to design and follow-through, is what can happen when women come together without restraint or any preconceived notions of what is possible.

“This has just been an example of teamwork extraordinaire,” Bergquist says.

“The building, the design and the organization itself is proof of concept that when you bring women together — across talents, across industries, across silos — and you create community toward shared goals of uplifting each other, there’s real magic that’s possible,” Strauss says. alcoveri.org