BOISE, Idaho (CBS2) — Treefort Music Festival has returned to the City of Trees for the 11th time.
The five-day music festival features venues throughout Boise, inside and outside. A major change with this year's festival is the location of the main stage. The location Treefort used to use as its main area is being turned into residential apartments, so Treefort has moved most of its forts into Julia Davis Park.
Another addition to the festival is Treefort Music Hall, which will also double as a headquarters for Treefort. It's located in the heart of downtown, attached to The Warehouse Food Hall, on the corner of Capitol and Broad.
Festival Director and CEO of Duck Club Entertainment, Eric Gilbert, said the space will enable Treefort's team to have a year-round presence.
"It just gives us more of a hub, like a year-round hub," Gilbert said.
Gilbert noted that the location was a big part of why the team decided to make it their headquarters.
"We're excited about the location," Gilbert said. "It's really cool. We're right on Capitol Boulevard. It's really visible, it's right like I said, it's in the heart of Boise... Treefort is very downtown Boise-centric, so it was important to us as well to have our headquarters be right in the middle of it all."
Gilbert mentioned that in previous years, the team had to work out of a variety of locations.
"We've done a lot of meetings in coffee shops and a variety of spaces, so this feels like the first kind of real office that we've had," Gilbert said.
Treefort Music Hall had been a concept for several years, with the original idea dating back to the early 2010s when festival co-founder Lori Shandro envisioned a music space in the center of Boise.
Shandro pitched the idea with Gilbert suggesting they focus on a music festival, which ended up becoming the first Treefort in 2012. Years later, the team was able to revisit the idea, and work toward getting a permanent venue in downtown.
Treefort Music Hall is not fully completed, but the space is concert-ready. Gilbert said that most concert-goers will be impressed when they see the venue, and that it's set to be complete sometime in June or July. He added that it will have a rooftop lounge when it's fully built.
Gilbert remarked on the festival's growth, looking at how the original idea blossomed into a five-day festival with hundreds of bands.
"I called it a 3-day small festival with 60 bands, and here we are today with a five-day festival with over 500 bands," Gilbert said. "And so, it's kind of cool that now it's come full circle. Over those ten years, we've been able to distill a lot of ideas, and a lot of things. About five years ago, we started working on the idea of owning our own venue again, and that came to fruition just a few days ago."
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