Illustration by Manu Cunhas
On a crisp day in October, about a dozen people gather outside Sweetgum Manor in North Avondale and begin walking single file down a wooded trail. Mostly strangers, the group follows instructions and keeps enough space between one another to focus on their own individual paths, taking in the forest’s sights, smells, and sounds.
Before stepping outside, Pam Lowe Cho explains to the group—gathered here on a Sunday afternoon for an introduction to “forest bathing”—that the activity began in Japan in the 1980s as a way to improve people’s health and well-being. “Shinrin-Yoku is the practice of reducing stress by immersing oneself in a nature-inspired environment such as a forest, park, or indoor space inspired by nature,” says Cho, who is certified by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy. “It has positive effects on the mind and body, including reduced stress, anxiety, and blood pressure, as well as strengthened immunity, focus, and energy.”
Along the path, Cho pauses the group and invites them to join in a few simple activities. Close your eyes, she asks. Carefully turn in a circle. When you get the urge to stop, do so. Open your eyes. What do you see? Next, reach down and pick up an object from the forest floor. Examine it. Bring it to your face. How does it smell?
At points of the guided walk, participants are invited to share their thoughts. They laugh together when Sweetgum’s resident dog, Thor, gets the zoomies, and the experience ends with a gratitude tea ceremony, as is tradition, before the group makes its way past warm fires burning in large hearths on either side of the living room and into a yoga studio for a restorative class led by Sweetgum founder Abby Allen.
Allen began imagining this place—what she calls a “social sanctuary”—more than a decade ago. An expression of her life experiences and skills, she says the pieces fell into place when she purchased the 4.5-acre property on Washington Avenue, former residence of the late physician and public health trailblazer O’dell Owens, M.D.
“There was a visceral feeling when I got on the land,” says Allen. “I felt like I could exhale up here.” Her resolve deepened upon learning that Civil Rights leaders Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks and poet Maya Angelou had visited Owens there. He died in 2022 after holding multiple leadership roles in Cincinnati, including Hamilton County coroner, president of Cincinnati State, and CEO of the health education nonprofit Interact for Health.
Photograph by Monsta Audio and Visual
“O’dell Owens was so committed to the health of the Cincinnati community,” says Allen, a New York City native who moved to Cincinnati in 2019 after coming here for more than 20 years to meet with clients at Procter & Gamble. “It felt important to get a chance to be a steward of this place.”
She opened Sweetgum, named for native trees on the property, in October 2024 and has since offered a carefully curated blend of classes and events, including yoga, forest bathing, crystal bowl sound baths, and all-day digital detox retreats she calls Present Day, where groups of up to 25 people move through grounding practices like breathwork and guided reflection, share a seasonal meal, and have spacious time to “rest, connect, and simply be.”
Driven by her belief in the transformative power of beauty, nature, and community, Allen likes to showcase local businesses and individual creators and creatives, with special events like last summer’s Berries & Baking Weekend, which began with the group picking blueberries at McGlasson Farms in Hebron and ended in Sweetgum’s kitchen making blueberry muffins with local baker Joana Kemper. There was a social gathering called Fried and Fancy, where guests enjoyed conversation and fried chicken from Richie’s, the casual Avondale restaurant, paired with Champagne.
“I wanted to make retreating and coming together offline more accessible,” says Allen. “I want to encourage people to step out of what they know, because magical things happen when you do.”
Photograph by Romain Mayambi
Latondra Newton played a big role in creating the Sweetgum Manor. She initially met Allen after hiring Allen’s branding company, Neon Butterfly, to work on a project for Newton’s then-employer, the Walt Disney Company.
Before establishing Neon Butterfly, Allen had earned a history degree from Columbia University and spent two decades working for well-established global advertising and branding agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and J. Walter Thompson (now Thompson). “I have always been fascinated by people and why they do what they do,” Allen says, “and I always thought, I’m going to use media to do good. I’m going to learn to work with the best marketers and the best ad agencies.”
Growing up in the Upper East Side of New York City, Allen says her parents forced her and her brother to meditate often, and they were raised vegetarian before that was a popular thing to do. In her 20s, after her father died, she began a spiritual quest that led her to yoga, became a yoga teacher, and studied many lineages, including Tibetan Buddhism. She’s spent more than 300 hours in solitary retreat, practicing and learning under a variety of teachers around the world, including India and Peru.
Allen stepped away from her corporate job and created Neon Butterfly in order to amplify brands, businesses, and individuals with inclusive storytelling. She’s done work for Procter & Gamble as well as for StoryCorps, Disney, and other high-profile clients.
“My first impression of Abby was that she was very smart about the business she was doing and the service she was providing for my company,” Newton says. Finding they had similar values and interests, they became friends, and when Newton decided to end her decades-long career as a corporate executive, Allen called and said she had a big project cooking. She thought Newton should be involved.
Newton invited Allen to her primary residence in Pasadena, California, to talk things through. Upon seeing Newton’s home, Allen asked if she would spearhead Sweetgum’s interior design. Newton had designed a line of jewelry and sometimes gave design advice to friends and family, but she’d never taken on this kind of project.
She agreed, Newton says, “because Abby really cares about people. She just wants them to be well. It’s not something she says because it’s on trend. She feels it. Abby and I are unafraid to try new things and kind of go big, because at the very least we know we’ll learn a whole lot.”
The six-bedroom home and surrounding property, with pool and tennis court, needed a lot of work, Newton says. Unoccupied for several years, it had fallen into disrepair and was a hodgepodge of styles and tastes, having been expanded several times since the house was built in 1925.
Originally from Indiana, Newton has a second home in downtown Cincinnati and found herself at Sweetgum often during the year-long renovation. They hired contractors to knock down walls, raise ceilings, expand the kitchen, and construct the yoga studio in the space where an outdoor grilling station had been.
To preserve bits of its history and character, they repurposed some features of the house, like a glass chandelier in the foyer, which Newton took apart and redesigned with local artisan Celene Hawkins, who fabricated the showpiece hanging there now. The cabinetry in a new mudroom was modified from the original kitchen cabinets.
Allen and Newton endeavored to create a feeling when you walk into Sweetgum: welcoming yet upscale, luxurious yet approachable. “Because I and you deserve that feeling,” Newton says. Shoes always come off when you walk through the door.
Allen says she wants people to feel cared for and safe when they’re at Sweetgum. “I wanted to create this place, honestly, to be what I feel like I needed and wasn’t seeing in Cincinnati, or frankly in a lot of places,” she says. “A place that feels like you’re coming home to yourself, and you’re literally coming into a home.” (Allen lives in a private section of the house.)
She’s excited about ongoing projects, including the “speakeasy,” an entertainment space in the basement with a full banquet room, bar, and wine cellar, and more outdoor gardens so that Sweetgum can start producing its food, herbs, and flowers and add gardening to the list of possible activities.
Allen offers individual and corporate memberships, with various levels of access to the property, including use of the pool and discounts on classes and events. Andrea Dylewski, a member who moved to Cincinnati around the same time as Allen, calls Sweetgum a breath of fresh air. “It’s a place where you can go to think, to breathe, and to reengage,” she says. “You could go get a massage, a bucket of ice cream, or a hug from a friend, but it’s different when you spend time around people who aren’t necessarily your best friends. They’re your neighbors, members of your community, and that’s going to recharge you in a very different way by enrichening your personal experience.”
Photograph by Chunk of China
Community is something that happens spontaneously, Allen says. It can’t be forced, but you can create places where it’s more likely to happen.
Like on a Saturday evening in November, when 10 guests gather at Sweetgum for the second event in a series called Joy of the Table. Participants paid $300 each to share a meal prepared by Jeffery Harris, owner and executive chef of acclaimed Over-the-Rhine restaurant Nolia (serendipitously named after the Magnolia tree).
Guests trickle into the kitchen, and Harris’s wife Heather offers each a glass of red or white wine, a sparking non-alcoholic option, or water and presents a set of handwritten recipe cards for everything on the night’s menu: shrimp and andouille gumbo, a charred cabbage salad with Tasso vinegarette, and Harris’s beloved skillet cornbread, an item that has never left Nolia’s menu.
Harris is a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef Great Lakes, whose restaurant was named among the 50 Best New Restaurants in 2024 by Esquire magazine. He prepared the gumbo ahead of time, because, he explains, it’s always better the second day. The group works on the rest of the meal together in the kitchen.
Harris shows how to char a head of cabbage and passes around the buttermilk, an ingredient for the cornbread, for everyone to smell. A stickler for quality local ingredients, he shares his secrets and techniques, like how to make a perfect roux—the base for a gumbo and many other Southern dishes—not on the stovetop but in the oven.
“It’s done when it smells like popcorn,” says Harris, who is also a transplant to Cincinnati, arriving on a bus a couple of weeks after Hurricane Katrina ravaged his hometown of New Orleans in 2005. He lost his home in the Ninth Ward to the flood waters, along with his job at the time, as sous chef for celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse. He chose the Cincinnati region to start over because his ex-wife had family here.
As Harris cooks, he shares with his guests, who are a variety of ages and races, that everyone cooked in his family but it was the women who taught him, starting around the age of 4. His great grandmother Jimmy Lou is his greatest inspiration.
“We didn’t have computer tablets with recipes back then, so for me it was peeling shrimp, it was putting the chitlins in the sink and letting the water run through them, it was putting butter in to grease the cornbread pan,” Harris says.
When the food is done, everyone joins the Harrises to pile their plates with cornbread and salad, fill their bowls with rice and gumbo, and take a seat together at the large dining room table, designed by Newton and constructed by local artist Peter Griffin.
Conversation—interrupted by “mmmms” and “this really is the best cornbread”—turns to what people cooked for Thanksgiving the week before, then where to get authentic New Orleans food in Cincinnati. After everyone finishes eating, Allen and the Harrises pack up servings of roux and homemade Tasso for guests to take home and use in their own kitchens.
“I could have easily done this at my own restaurant, but this is different,” says Harris. “You get to get a little bit more intimate, talking to the people, letting them know, Yeah, I’m from Nolia but this isn’t Nolia.”
Harris and Allen have teamed up for another pop-up dinner collaborative they’re calling The Chef Series, rooted in Southern storytelling, seasonal ritual, and “Cincinnati’s creative landscape,” she says. The first dinner will be held May 3 featuring foods inspired by the African diaspora, including Haitian and Creole food. Additional dinners are planned throughout 2026.
“This,” Harris says, “is putting culture on the plate.”
Allen says what she’s truly interested in is re-imagining what home and community mean. “We have become so disconnected from ourselves and each other,” she says, which is partially why she chose to move to the Midwest. “Life on the coast becomes very siloed in terms of thinking, and you’re in an echo chamber. I wanted to be around more regular Americans, if you will.”
Allen is biracial, which has fueled her lifelong desire to bring people together, having had to learn to navigate different worlds herself. “I think it’s important to understand as many different kinds of people as possible,” she says.
Cincinnati had always appealed to her, and she’d made some important connections here. It felt like a big city, but smaller and more intimate. Her hope is that Sweetgum can support people coming together and help create a compassionate future.
Asa Featherstone IV has felt that support. The two were introduced by a mutual friend, and he immediately recognized Allen’s drive and passion for building community. “Honestly, she made me want to sharpen up what I was doing,” says Featherstone, an artist and full-time digital content creator for Great Parks of Hamilton County, who also puts together a photography magazine called Midtones featuring work by and about communities of color across the Midwest and the Rustbelt. Allen hosted a pop-up exhibition and panel discussion for the magazine’s first volume last year.
Featherstone calls himself a friend of Sweetgum, attending events and supporting Allen when he can. He appreciates the environment she’s created there: casual but intentional, deep but not overly serious.
“There’s no pressure to perform or look a certain way,” he says. “You’re not here to be seen, you’re here to connect with people. And people are massively stressed out. Everybody’s lying to each other on the internet, and so nobody really knows what’s real. People need spaces where they can be in front of other people and just talk and hang out. We put on a front that we don’t care about each other, but we really do.”
Alena O’Donnell says Sweetgum provides opportunities for a much-needed pause to feast together, to stretch together, to have dialogue together. She learned about the place from a friend who suggested O’Donnell sit on a panel being held there during Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month called “Reclaiming Our Roots.”
O’Donnell, who is adopted and “by blood am half Hawaiian and half Black and Mexican,” joined the panel, enjoyed the conversation, and made new connections. After attending a few more events and classes at Sweetgum, she decided to become a member. “It really gives you the opportunity to find out who your fellow human citizen is,” she says. “Whether race or gender, no matter how we are cast or classified, we are not a monolith. We’re breaking down stereotypes, and that’s important.”
O’Donnell lives in North Avondale, and her daughter goes to school there. Her mother was principal at one of Owens’s childhood schools. “Being able to connect with and find Sweetgum just down the road from where I live is a joy,” she says. “What Abby is doing is creating intentional spaces to create opportunities for these pockets of community that can really ripple out.”
To spread her ethos further, Allen has formed a nonprofit, the Sweetgum Manor Foundation. This winter the nonprofit accepted a $53,000 Safe and Clean grant from the city of Cincinnati, administered by Keep Cincinnati Beautiful, to establish the Washington Wellness Triangle, “a youth-led initiative that responds to what Avondale youth have asked for,” Allen says. “Calm, safe spaces [in which] to breathe, belong, and heal.”
The project will engage youth ages 15–24 in paid year-round training that combines gardening, art-making, and mindfulness to transform the Washington–Clinton Springs–Harvey Avenue corridor into a restorative wellness district. Working with local partners, Allen says young people can learn to regulate stress, cultivate leadership, and design environments proven to reduce anxiety and depression.
“The project goes beyond cleaning and greening,” she says. “It creates the psychological conditions for lasting wellness and community resilience.”
Returning to Allen’s October restorative yoga class, participants are lying on their backs in the final resting pose, Shavasana. Some wrap themselves in a blanket or put a bolster under their knees for comfort. Allen reads from When Things Fall Apart, a book by Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön.
“This very moment is a perfect teacher, and it’s always with us, is really a most profound instruction,” Allen reads. “Just seeing what’s going on, that’s the teaching right there. We can be with what’s going on and not disassociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.”
Sweetgum isn’t about becoming Buddhist or about being part of a particular race or political persuasion, Allen says. It’s not about one thing. It is about rest, beauty, and belonging. “Community will save us,” she says. “The more we understand our shared humanity, the better the world will be.”
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