Walk into the New Canaan Library on a weekday morning and you will have to circle twice for a table near the windows. Laptops are open, coffee cups from The Farmer's Grind are sweating rings onto the counters, and somewhere upstairs a toddler is being talked through a picture book in the tone reserved specifically for toddlers. It looks, and functions, like the town's actual living room. That is not incidental. It is what the building was designed to be, and last August the rest of the library world noticed.
What most people sipping their oat milk lattes here this month may not know is that the celebrated new library has a sibling sitting quietly nearby, one that has been waiting since 2023 for someone to decide what it gets to become.
The Award Nobody at the Coffee Bar Mentioned
In August 2025, New Canaan Library was named one of three finalists worldwide for the IFLA/Baker & Taylor Public Library of the Year award, judged by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions at its 89th World Library and Information Congress in Astana, Kazakhstan. The other two finalists were Heping Library in Shanghai, built inside a public park, and Gabrielle-Roy Library in Québec City, which ultimately won. New Canaan Library CEO Ellen Sullivan Crovatto and Centerbrook Architects principal Jim Childress presented the town's case live over videoconference, at five in the morning local time, to more than 350 librarians and architects.
IFLA jury member Raneetha Rajaratnam told the room that the 1913 library had been completely redesigned into a welcoming space for the entire community, and that its programming created the feeling of a light, public living room where residents could gather for a range of activities. Sullivan Crovatto later said New Canaan Library was only the third American library to reach the finalist round in seven years.
That is a genuinely rare honor for a library this size to land, and it explains why out-of-town visitors keep asking locals how New Canaan pulled it off. But an award like this measures a building at a single moment. It does not measure what happens next door.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
The library isn't coasting on the trophy case. The fall lineup already forming on the events calendar gives a sense of how much the space gets used on a weekly basis:
- An exhibit called "The Merritt: Masterwork of Design and Planning" is running in the Library's Lightburn Gallery, paired with a children's program led by Arianne Kolb, executive director of the Merritt Parkway Conservancy, where kids entering grades 2 through 4 this fall design their own version of a Merritt Parkway bridge.
- The Library Green hosted a free evening of outdoor dance this summer featuring the Thomas/Ortiz Dance Company and East Coast Contemporary Ballet, part of a wider Fairfield County series that also brought in Parsons Dance Company, Take Dance Company, Amy Marshall Dance Company, and Neville Dance Company.
- A Silent Book Club met on the Green through the summer, built around an hour of quiet reading followed by an optional half hour of conversation.
- Christine's Critters, a live raptor and reptile program, brought hawks, owls, falcons, and a few rescued reptiles through for a hands-on visit.
That density of programming, a design exhibit, touring dance companies, a raptor show, all inside or beside a public library, is a large part of why the IFLA jury singled the building out. It was built to hold more than books, and it is doing exactly that.
The Café That Became a Third Room in Everyone's House
If the library is the town's living room, The Farmer's Grind is its kitchen. The café, run by Erich and Michelle Smith out of South Salem, New York, opened its doors inside the library six weeks after the new building did, and it has become the default answer to "where should we meet" for a certain kind of New Canaan errand. The menu runs from Nutella lattes and matchas to house chais and espresso drinks finished with local honey, and the tables by the floor-to-ceiling windows at the back of the main floor fill up fast enough that regulars know to arrive before the school pickup rush.
When the café first opened, then-executive director Lisa Oldham put the demand plainly:
"The community has long requested a café in the library and it is absolutely wonderful to finally deliver with such a beautifully presented and well run business on site."
One practical note for anyone planning a visit this month: the café is still running summer hours, open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and closed on weekends. The fuller Monday-through-Thursday schedule, open until 6 p.m., returns after Labor Day. If your plan involves a Saturday coffee and a stack of returns, the café won't be the one meeting you there until the fall schedule kicks in.
The Building Next Door Nobody's Finished With
Here is the part of the story that the coffee crowd rarely brings up. The library everyone is celebrating replaced a smaller 1913 building on the same site, and rather than demolish it, the project's second phase called for lifting the original masonry and timber structure and relocating it onto the library's new green, where it has sat, mostly untouched, since the move. Its preservation was not uncontested. A group calling itself the New Canaan Preservation Alliance filed suits over the years about how much of the original structure would survive the relocation and what would happen to it afterward.
Three years later, the "afterward" still hasn't been decided. In February 2026, library officials went before the town's Board of Finance to ask for $1 million toward an expected $2 million renovation of the old building, betting that a restored 1913 structure could generate rental income for the library once finished. That request comes with a condition: the town won't commit its half unless the state confirms a matching $1 million, and Board of Finance chair Todd Lavieri told officials the town would not bond the money without that state commitment in place. As of that meeting, construction on the old library isn't expected to begin until 2027.
Put the two facts side by side and the picture of how this town actually operates gets sharper. The new library took roughly a decade of planning and fundraising, according to Centerbrook, and came out the other side with a global finalist ribbon. The building it replaced, sitting on the same lot, has been waiting since 2023 for a much smaller sum, and even that smaller sum is contingent on a state budget line that hasn't been secured. It is not a story about mismanagement. It is a story about how a small town's civic energy concentrates hard on one project at a time, and how the leftover pieces of the last project can sit in a kind of quiet limbo while everyone's attention is on the new thing.
If you live here, that is worth knowing the next time you walk past the old building on your way to a coffee at The Farmer's Grind. The library that made international headlines last summer is still, in a very real sense, an unfinished two-building project, and the second half of it is currently sitting in a Board of Finance line item waiting on Hartford.
Keeping an Eye on What's Next
None of this changes how good the new library is to actually use, and the fall calendar, from the Merritt Parkway exhibit to whatever dance company shows up on the Green next, gives plenty of reasons to be there regularly. But the old building's fate is a genuinely open question right now, not a settled footnote, and residents who care about how that corner of Main Street eventually gets used have a real window to weigh in before 2027 construction plans firm up.
Janis Hennessy has spent more than two decades watching how New Canaan's civic decisions, from school budgets to town green renovations, shape the character of specific streets and neighborhoods long before those changes show up in a listing description. If you are curious about how a particular pocket of town, including the blocks around Main Street and the library green, is trending, Janis Hennessy is glad to talk it through. Request a Bespoke Market Consultation whenever you're ready.
