Revolutsia is more than Wichita’s first shipping container mall

Revolutsia has the distinction of being Wichita’s first and only open-air, two-story shipping container mall, but it means a lot more than that to the developers who created it and the approximately 20 tenants that have set up businesses at the corner of Central and Volutsia.

With Revolutsia, Bokeh Development has created what it calls a reimagined space that gives budding entrepreneurs a place to start a business and a cool, urban feature that might attract some human capital to the community.

In 2018, developers Michael Ramsey and Robert Eyster, who initially started a partnership as medical colleagues, took an old stone cottage that had once been a gas station and added 36 rusting shipping containers to a street corner in what had become more of a drive-through neighborhood than a place where people would want to linger.

It was a good fit for the pair who have developed a reputation for taking existing structures in downtown Wichita and turning them into hip places, like the parking-garage-turned-apartment complex Broadway Autopark, Cor-Ten office building and The Lux apartments.

“One of the core values with Bokeh is to try to find the vision that other developers aren’t pursuing,” said Ramsey, Bokeh’s manager and vice president. Bokeh, pronounced like bouquet, is a Japanese photography term for parts of an image that are out of focus.

“Our job is to find value and interest in things that aren’t in focus for most people,” Ramsey said. “We see the value and invest in that blurred edge.”

But that doesn’t mean the developers don’t have a focus for their projects. The focus for Revolutsia has been to help small business owners establish smart, quaint spaces in a nontraditional setting.

Its tenants include Little Lion Café, the German restaurant Prost and its nearby German market, a vintage clothing store, a bookstore, a hair salon, a Hispanic artisan shop, a barbershop and even a bank branch. Bokeh Development recently finished a second building phase that added eight containers.

Its location at Central and Volutsia was also deliberate, said Ramsey, who calls the area a transitional neighborhood. With Wesley Hospital located a half-mile farther east, traffic counts showed a high volume of cars.

“We look for good bones,” said Ramsey, a former physician assistant in Eyster’s orthopedic practice. As former health-care practitioners, the pair is “research-driven and numbers heavy,” Ramsey said.

From firsthand experience, Ramsey knows Wichita needs to develop areas that will attract young professionals, and he thinks places like Revolutsia and Bokeh’s other developments can do that.

Ramsey told his children he’d paid for their college on the condition that they choose universities in diverse urban areas. Since he’d spent much of his youth in Washington, D.C., he wanted them to experience urban living too — at least temporarily.

But when his kids indicated they didn’t want to return to their hometown, he realized Wichita has a harder time competing with larger metropolitan areas, which led Bokeh Development to create downtown living spaces and a nontraditional retail and restaurant destination.

Editor’s note: Bokeh Development has completed a second building phase that added eight containers. The timing of the addition was incorrect in an earlier version of this story. (Updated 3:20 p.m. 2/17/2020)

This story was originally published February 16, 2020 at 12:00 AM.