A BANK, A VAULT, AND A BRANCH

This building has stood on the corner of Main and 11th since 1914, and it spent much of that time as a bank. We've kept what mattered — the vault door, the sweeping stairway, the ceilings — and put a bar in the middle of it.

A bank was never one room. There was the hall you walked into, the quieter floor above it where the decisions got made, and the working level below. We kept that arrangement and gave each floor its own job.

The Vault is the front of the house and the front of the building. Upstairs on the mezzanine there's a second bar, a fireplace, a baby grand, and a view of downtown. It is a unique and beautiful setting for booking your special event.

The Raven Branch is the dining room tucked below The Vault, accessible internally and through the door on 11th. Dark, low, and comfortable — forty seats, a short menu, no hurry to turn the table. Before us this room was the Bull Branch, a name plenty of people in this city still say without hesitation, and we'd rather it kept being said. Branch is also a banking word. In a building that was once a bank, a vault and a branch felt like the right two words to keep.

The music here has a history that isn't ours. For the past year, The Raven Lounge was the room in Lynchburg where local musicians played what they actually wanted to play — folk or rock one night, jazz or bluegrass the next, something unclassifiable after that. It wasn't a genre. It was a standard. Jenee Davis built it, and we admired it enough that we were preparing to take it over and keep it running. Then Raven's lease ended, and the room closed before we could.

So we asked her a simpler question: where does the music go now? She agreed it should move here and she books it now — the same players, the same nights, the same refusal to do the obvious thing — and she sings here too.

The stair to the mezzanine.