Kaelyn Query in Limestone Hall, her event venue on the top floor of Lexington’s renovated courthouse. Photo by Theresa Stanley
Kaelyn Query has a packed calendar. As founder and president of LexEffect, a local event company, she will consult, plan, manage and promote more than 100 events this year, many from start to finish.
Some of LexEffect’s original events—like Chew, Bourbon Social and MoonTower Music Festival—have become popular annual staples. And Query continues to develop new concepts. This year she launched LexBrunch, a family friendly-concert series offering brunch at The Burl every other Sunday, and plans are currently underway for a Juleps and Jockeys Derby celebration in May. Query and her partners in the MoonTower Music Festival are also in talks with potential partners who can help substantially grow the festival and further develop a signature event for Lexington and the region.
Now she’s adding even more to her plate as LexEffect expands into managing and owning its own venues. It’s a new wrinkle Query calls “fun and interesting and terrible and challenging and great.”
“We’re a three-headed giant or a monster, depending on the day,” she said.
In addition to public and private events, that third “head” includes:
• Limestone Hall, an event space located in the top floor of downtown Lexington’s renovated courthouse. In addition to an onsite catering kitchen, Limestone Hall offers two event rooms that can each seat more than 200 guests, plus a space in the rotunda for more intimate affairs. When the venue opens its doors in February, LexEffect plans to locate some of its original events there for 2018, including a Stache Bash and New Years’ Eve party.
• A horse farm on Old Frankfort Pike that’s nestled between Keeneland and the Kentucky Horse Park. With a large main house, including a veranda overlooking tobacco and stall barns, the venue is set up to host indoor and outdoor events such as cocktail parties, silent auctions and open-air farm-to-table dinners.
• West Sixth Farm, a 120-acre property in Franklin County, that will include a small-scale production facility, apple orchard and taproom with unique estate ales. The farm will tentatively open for events by this summer.
• And finally Copper Fox in Richmond, Kentucky. Originally a two-screen movie theater and owned by The Colman Group, the venue is well-suited for reception hall-style events like weddings, fundraisers and Greek functions. The venue can accommodate a variety of group sizes in colorful spaces like The Reel Room, The Director’s Room, and, naturally, The Theatre.
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The venue features several distinct areas, including an intimate nook near the building’s newly uncovered dome. Photo by Theresa Stanley
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A conceptual rendering shows how Limestone Hall will likely look and function.
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A rendering of the completed courthouse renovation project. Limestone Hall, slated to open in February 2018, will be among the first spaces to officially open to the public.
While each venue is unique, they all reflect Query’s commitment to creating spaces and events with ties to local history, culture and community. It was this love of Central Kentucky that inspired Tiffany Hardin, who manages Copper Fox, to join her team.
“I wanted to be part of a company that holds value on local places,” Hardin said.
Query will continue to eye new locations, she said, but for now will concentrate on transforming each space into a functional and financially sustainable venue.
“It’s a long game,” Query said of planning, promoting and executing new events, many of which can take a year or more to come to fruition. “We have to partner with people who understand that you don’t just open the doors and the money starts flowing in. That’s not how it works, which we learned the hard way.”
For Query, who last year was recognized by Commerce Lexington with its Young Entrepreneur award, it’s also been a long road to building LexEffect. She broke into the event business through a high school internship but never imagined she’d make a career out of events.
Instead, for years she worked at catering companies and later managed a few restaurants.
“I’ve done almost everything that you can do in the hospitality industry—good, bad and ugly,” she said.
Query began coordinating events part time. For more than a year, she ran her nascent business out of a small office at The Plantory, worked a 9-to-5 day job and then met with clients in the evenings. Coincidentally, just as her “side job” was growing big enough to need a tax ID, the restaurant where she worked announced it was closing. Query took a leap.
"We wanted to make an impact, and we wanted to create cool and unique things for people."
“My initial goal was to create events for the sake of entertainment,” Query said. “We wanted to make an impact, and we wanted to create cool and unique things for people. We’re a little bigger now than when I first started, but the goal is the same.”
It’s typical in the events industry to specialize, but early on she decided on a full-service firm—a one-stop shop that includes PR and marketing, registration and web support, videography, photography, graphic design and printing.
Event manager Alyssa Masterson believes that keeping their services diverse is “extremely important” to LexEffect’s vision. But no matter the type of event—whether client-driven or entirely paid for and produced by LexEffect—the team’s collective experience and organization make them successful.
“Once we have the vision for an event, we break it down to the smallest details that many people wouldn’t think of,” Masterson said. “We’ve already been thinking it through in the back of our minds.”
The company’s passion and mission is made plain by its name; Query and crew hope that these new venues and events will have a lasting and positive effect in the Lexington community.