By Lauren Mechling
When the longtime Great Barrington home store Hammertown announced in March it would be shuttering, many locals felt the loss immediately. For decades, the store had functioned as more than a place to buy furniture: it was a community hub where locals hung out and picked up design inspo or dinner-party gifts.
Carly Shafiroff had another reaction to the news: sheer panic.
“As soon as I heard the rumor that the lease was ending,” she said, “I knew if I didn’t slide in as quickly as possible, someone else was going to.”
At 28, the interior designer has already arranged more than 50 homes. For a feverish two months this spring, the Berkshire native figured out how to create a new kind of environment. Her first retail space will reflect her own taste but also the aesthetic of the area at large.
“Modern heritage” is how Shafiroff describes her aesthetic, which is marked by clean lines and timeless furnishings, with a deep sense of warmth and unfussiness baked in. She doesn’t go for anything that feels too trendy or “pick-me” when she is finalizing commissions for her clients, and it’s the same way at the shop: “There’s nothing that you’d look at in 10 years and say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I bought that.’”
Shafiroff signed the lease on March 31 and, less than two months later, she opened Meadow House, with the help of three former Hammertown employees who came on full-time to work as her fast-track tutors on the ins and outs of retail. “Without them, I would have gone up in flames,” she said. The 2,700-square-foot furniture and lifestyle store occupies the former Hammertown space at 15 Bridge Street.
Her design firm’s office is now located in the back of the store, but that’s where the coziness between her two businesses stops. “I am more interested in providing a service to the other local designers than promoting my own,” said Shafiroff, whose mother, Linda, co-owns an all-female design-build company called Creative Building Solutions in Great Barrington. The younger Shafiroff wants Meadow House to function as a resource for the area’s broader design community. Her store offers trade discounts, private shopping hours, and educational events where designers can gather.
“That’s why I chose to call it Meadow House instead of using my own name,” she said.
The Venn diagram of Shafiroff’s selections for private clients and the store has little overlap. When she orders a custom sofa for a client, it already has a destination and a purpose, which emboldens her to make a selection that is specific to her client’s tastes. Retail requires a little more guesswork.
“This is kind of like buying a bunch of stuff that has no home,” Shafiroff said on the eve of the store’s pre-party for members of the trade. “You have to curate it in a way that people feel inclined to purchase.”
So she looked to her greatest muse: the Berkshires. “The aesthetic of the region is relaxed and sophisticated, which can seem like a contradiction but absolutely isn’t,” she said. “We have beautiful homes here, but we’re not precious about them. We want them to feel lived in.”
At the store, Shafiroff sells a selection of furniture and antiques, as well as colorful dishes from the Japanese tableware brand Miya, Turkish rugs from a Vermont textile dealer, and plenty of embroidery kits and decorative doodads from local makers. “The fun thing about going shopping at an actual store versus scouring the internet for the sofa that you absolutely need to find, is even if you don’t end up buying a sofa, it’s okay,” she said. “You still get the pleasure of leaving with something that makes you happy.”
