Sacramento’s entrepreneurial youth: How two business owners are redefining what ‘third spaces’ can look like

In the midst of an ever-growing sea of cafés and markets sprouting up in California’s capital city, a small, bright business sits on bustling 16th Street harboring two owners, their families and a shared dream for developing third spaces grounded in creativity and compassion.

A “third space” is defined as a relaxed public environment where members of the community can interact, separate from the “first space,” their home, and the “second space,” their place of work, as described by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg.

With a successful vendor market in their holster, a bustling event venue space in their future and a captivating café in their present, third places are not unfamiliar to Elk Grove natives Lalo Mata, 25, and Leandra Coronado, 24, who are reshaping what it looks like to thoughtfully engage with Sacramento.

Mata and Coronado, who have been dating for five years, founded the white brick and plant-laden Sun House Café in spring 2025, which they say draws inspiration from major cities, emphasizes free expression and incorporates unique marketing tactics, such as stamp cards, local artist features and unique rotating beverages.

“We love what we do. I think everything on the menu is really good,” Coronado said. “I want you to come up [to the counter] and not know what you want because everything sounds good. Our big thing, too, was making drinks that maybe other cafés don’t make – to give you something different where you’ll be like, ‘This is good. I’ll come back.’”

Starring creative drinks such as fruity pebbles matcha, ube cream lattes and caramel apple spritzes, the couple sold over 24,000 drinks in their first 125 days of operation, with their signature banana cream matcha becoming a customer favorite. Even with their constantly evolving projects, Mata said he and Coronado’s relationship is only strengthened by being business partners.

“Sometimes people will say, ‘It’s probably hard working with your partner,’” Mata said. “But I always want to be with her regardless of whatever we’re doing. She’s always been my best friend before my girlfriend, and she’s always been those two before a business partner. Every time we’ve started a business, it’s brought us closer because if there’s a struggle, we’re always there for each other.”

This isn’t Mata and Coronado’s first business venture as they also began the popular SacTown’s Finest Market which has seen over 500,000 attendees, raised $6 million for local businesses and amassed about 60,000 Instagram followers since its founding in February 2022. The market is currently on a hiatus, though Mata and Coronado say they plan to bring it back eventually, albeit with changes.

RELATED: The Trini Table brings Southern Caribbean flavors to Sacramento

“Over the years, what we wanted changed a little bit and 1776980378 we have the café,” Coronado said. “We do eventually want to bring SacTown’s Finest Market back, but I think it might look differently just because we are different people now. You’ll always see everything we do is changing in a good way, and it’s matching who we are as people now.”

Coronado, a Sacramento State alumna, attended Cosumnes River College before transferring to Sac State to play Division I softball and graduating with a bachelor’s in psychology in 2024.

“I really liked my Sac State journey. I loved going on campus, enjoyed meeting people and being part of a team,” Coronado said. “One of [my softball] teammates is an employee here.”

Family and community are centerpiece values to Mata and Coronado, with their brothers, sisters, friends and cousins working at the café despite minimal barista experience beforehand. Mata said honoring one’s home is one of the many reasons they’re striving to build their businesses in Sacramento instead of moving elsewhere.

“If you don’t love your house, you’re not going to love another one,” Mata said. “I grew up here. My love is here. My family, my memories are all here. Why not bring what you love to the place that you love?”

A core element of Sun House Café is their vibrant, engaging social media content and graphic design which highlights their various seasonal menus, events and customer photos. The mind behind their dynamic branding is Phong Tran, a 25-year-old graphic designer and photographer.

Tran graduated from Sac State in 2024 with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Graphic Design and works for multimedia creative design agency Direct Message in Sacramento. He said he, Mata and Coronado met by chance while he was living in an apartment building near where the café was developed.

“My energy, my passion and my drive comes from doing work like Sun House where it’s supporting the local cause, it’s supporting a local business,” Tran said. “Bringing people together, you know, that kind of work is really imperative for me to keep me from getting burnt out.”

Young people in Sacramento and from Sac State are seeing a period of creative explosion, Tran said, with him seeing many people in his age group choosing to take big leaps like Mata and Coronado to achieve entrepreneurial and artistic dreams.

“There’s a lot of Sac State students that I know who are throwing events and establishing creative collectives just for the hell of it because they love it,” Tran said. “I feel like people are constantly moving, constantly growing, versus in places [where] they don’t really have that drive.”

Mata and Coronado are striding toward their futures with conviction, incorporating their ambitious concepts and experience with SacTown’s Finest Market into their newest expansion: an event venue adjacent to Sun House Café. Their goal with the space is to diversify their existing crowd by hosting a variety of community events, such as retail shopping, nightlife happenings, pilates and food-related gatherings.

“I feel like in this space [as it is] you can’t see what our full ideas are, whether it’s drinks or interior design,” Mata said. “When the time’s right, it’ll be right, and when it happens, I think people will really like what they see when we’re able to operate at the full potential that we can.”

They both said that for young entrepreneurs with a dream to start a new business or project, it’s important to not compare new businesses to existing successful entities, emphasizing that each journey is individual.

In connection with Tran’s sentiment about Sacramento’s ambitious youth, Mata and Coronado echoed that Sacramento has potential, and that it’s key to remember purpose and community.

“For a city that’s kind of always known to be a couple years behind, we’re kind of bringing that idea of ‘Maybe this is like the next big coffee city’ or ‘Maybe this is the next big food city,’” Mata said. “It’s growing to a place where the new generation’s getting more brave, more confident, more creative with their ideas and putting it into a realistic realm where people can enjoy it too.”