Since moving into our location on 9G, our store has always been...raw. It's a welding shop that went up in the early 2000's, and far from a precision build. The space is massive though, compared to what we could have gotten anywhere else local at any price, and it couldn't have been more convenient: it's right next door.
We bought our property, which we named Eden Hill, in 2019. The first project was to turn a barn that hadn't been opened since the 80s into a workshop and makeshift apartment. That barn remains our workshop, and is less than 50 yards from a big metal building that was basically begging to be turned into a used car lot. Unwilling to live next to a used car lot, we rented it as soon as it became available.
We hadn't had a retail store in about a year, and our dreams were shifting. Whereas before it had been all antiques all the time, now our brains were twiddling with the idea of pairing the antiques we loved with designs we would make — and that would feel at home in the spaces we crave.
The space was handed over to us in the Fall of 2021, a few months after our son was born, and we lept into action. Like all retail and restaurant renters know, the longer you wait before opening the more painful the rent — however reasonable — feels. We needed to open, and fast. Our plan was minimum build out for minimum price. We bought used warehouse shelving that was delivered in a massive truck, and emptied our storage units to have starting stock.
Since then, the store has served us well, but it's also always been unfinished. There has never been a proper counter, necessitating whomever is working to scramble to check people out, and the scale of the space which was a selling point has proved daunting. It's difficult to make a raw warehouse with 16-foot ceilings cozy.
As a team, we muddled over what to do to address our pain points. All of us, somewhat independently, came to the same conclusion: it's too much space.
I saw it myself in the amount of time I was spending on real estate websites pining over much smaller and more intimate retail options. Moving was out of the question, though, as we then couldn't control who would be our neighbor next.
Together as a team, we came up with an idea: we would cut the store in half.
The back half would become additional production space, a desperately expansion of the area we have in our barn workshop.
The front would be finished into the store we wanted it to be. Still imperfect — it's a warehouse, not a prewar building with original built-ins — but closer. And maybe, in the future, we can bring it closer still.
This month, we're closing the store for most of February to turn the imagined transformation into a reality. End date is uncertain, as always goes with construction, but we will be celebrating the reopening with a celebration so look out for an invite.
