The building on North 4th Street that houses NextFab’s Riverwards location is warm and inviting tonight — There’s a mixture of finished walls and exposed areas of building material mixed throughout the space and the hum and whirr of the running electronics are softly audible.

An innovative maker-space founded in 2009, NextFab serves as a work area for anyone creative and hands-on. The North 4th Street location opened in April 2015. To use the facilities, which accommodate woodworking, metalworking, 3D printing and, jewelry making, members pay a monthly fee and are, based on the type of membership they choose, allowed to spend a certain amount of time each month tinkering, planning, building and creating at NextFab. The company caters to the needs of beginners and professionals alike, even offering kids’ programs. On this particular night, they are offering an open studio tour featuring take-away projects and beverages for the community.

A door adorned with NextFab’s logo sits open, adjacent to a window through which a technology room is visible. The room is full of finished projects, devices and trinkets, which line the upper shelves above rows of computers.

Inside of the facility, bright plastic buckets full of beverages sit atop a small coffee table in front of a couch. Across the way, a 3D printer chugs along on top of a counter full of previously printed projects.

The printer is emitting plastic — its arm moving and twitching in the shape of a leaf, fabricating a fall-themed cookie cutter. People begin to filter in, greeted by Laate Olukotun, NextFab’s Marketing Manager, and Melissa Guglielmo and Matthew Malesky, two staff members. The guests stop and pick up the finished cutters, turning them over and passing them along, asking questions about printers, programs, memberships and the plastic pieces on the counter.

The evening is part of an open studio winter series that welcomes community members to drop in and explore the future of making. Every Wednesday night throughout the fall and winter months NextFab is inviting people to tour the space, enjoy beverages and see their 3D printers and laser cutters in action as they make seasonal projects.

The tour being offered on this night, led by Malesky, begins, and the crowd shuffles into the woodworking facility, where walls of tools and equipment surround the working floor, which houses different types of machinery.

“We try to make it easy for members. We have stuff like consumables, like glue and screws, here for them. We also have [materials for sale], hardwoods and stuff that you would need to go out to the saw mill and have a pickup truck to get yourself. It’s pretty nice [for members] to be able to access all of that,” Guglielmo said.

The next space we visited at the open house is the metalworking space. Masks and aprons sit in a row outside and lifting back the plastic leads to a room lined with red plastic curtains and equipped with heavy duty machinery for the metal fanatics among us. To the right of the metalworking area is a jewelry making facility, where rows of desks with lamps line the middle of the room, which is full of equipment.

In addition to all of the tools and machinery they already offer, NextFab is always looking to improve and meet the needs of their members. At orientations, they issue a survey to new members to garner ideas about what they’d like to see in the spaces they use. Only a short time earlier, for example, Guglielmo took a request for jewelry pieces that a client had hoped to learn to work with and incorporate into her creations.

“We’re open ears to [suggestions],” Guglielmo said. “It’s a community based studio and it’s for members. It’s nice to set up the studio as much as Matt and I did over the winter… but now it’s more alive because it changes as members request new things.”

In addition to the fully equipped spaces and new features by request, one of NextFab’s assets as a company is their knowledgeable staff, a resource for members of all skill levels.

“We have these unbelievable experts. Matt and Melissa are definitely the experts here. People come to them for serious guidance in every single project that they do. Some people are already very, very… proficient in everything,” Olukotun said.

“But most need some kind of guidance and some kind of adjusted trajectory, and the wonderful thing is that between Matt and Melissa’s experience and their willingness and interest in expanding their own knowledge, the people that become members really kind of get a cheat sheet. You are accelerating your learning curve because you get to match [our staff’s] knowledge. To me, that’s one of the most wonderful things.”

Nextfab’s 1227 N 4th Street location will be hosting all ages open studio nights every Wednesday from 6-8 PM until February 10th. Promotional codes are being given to those who visitor NextFab during the Open Studio event series. More details about their facilities and membership options are available on their website.