Welcome to the diary. I have wanted to start this for a long time, a place to tell you the real, unfiltered, slightly chaotic story of what it actually takes to build a shop from scratch. Not the pretty finished photos (though there will be plenty of those too), but the behind the scenes truth. The wrong deliveries. The customs nightmares. The yard sale finds. The friends who show up with tools in hand. All of it.

So let's start where every good story about a shop should start: the design.

The wallpaper that almost didn't make it

The wallpaper in the shop has a story before it ever touched our walls. It was saved from going into archives, pulled specifically for us from the London Garden Museum. I fell in love with it immediately, the pattern felt like exactly the kind of quiet, grown up botanical mood I wanted for the space. What I did not fully appreciate was how long it would take to actually be shipped and installed. Weeks turned into more weeks. And then, just when I thought it had finally arrived, the wrong piece showed up. I remember standing in the shop staring at a rolls that was not at all what I ordered, laughing because at that point what else can you do. The installer had come from far away and i was LIVID. I had to delay our opening. Eventually the right wallpaper made it to Hudson, and every time I look at it now I think about how much patience it demanded before it ever got to be beautiful.

Furniture with a family map

Nothing in the shop was bought new off a showroom floor. I wanted every piece to have a place it came from, ideally a place that meant something to me.

The front desk came from England, where I am from. The display cabinet came from Litchfield, Connecticut, where my husband is from. So even before customers walk in, there is a quiet little map of our two families sitting right there at the entrance.

Then there is the DeVol sink, which I will be honest, tested my patience more than almost anything else in this build. It got sent back to England twice because of a customs issue that I still do not fully understand, and every time it went back I had to sit with the very real possibility that it might just never arrive. It did, eventually, and I love it more for the fight it took to get here.

We painted the place cream and it looked yellow - we had to find the perfect cream that would work and just so happens that my friend Annie had done up her salon the year prior and had found the best cream to ever exist. We repainted it in Casa Blanca and it was perfect. 

For storage and product display, I asked my friend's husband to build scalloped edge benches for us, and he came through with something that feels custom because it is. There is something so special about a shop where you can point to a piece and say, my friend's husband made that with his hands.

The marble table top and the green metal table were both sourced from different spots around Hudson, piece by piece, over time, the way this whole shop came together really. Another display cabinet started its life somewhere else entirely with doors on it, and we ripped them off to give it a more open, editorial feel. It had so many nails in it it seems like something from Matilda that Miss. Trunchbull would have used to put the kids in. I found that one at a yard sale in Claverack, which is exactly the kind of thing I hope keeps happening to me for the rest of my life.

The table I DM'd a stranger for

And then there is my favorite story of all. I found a table from a store called Forest bound in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and the moment I saw it online I knew. It was a 1920s John Darian piece with the most beautiful blue hues and a patina that you simply cannot fake or reproduce. I did not overthink it. I DM'd the owner and told her flat out that it was my dream table for my shop. She let me buy it from her. I still think about how kind that was, to sell someone their dream piece just because they asked with their whole heart.

Bringing it all to life before it was real

Before any of this existed in Hudson, it existed on a screen. My friend Hilah has this incredible tech design platform called Spoak, and I used it to actually see the shop before it was built. Spoak lets you build lifelike room mockups and mood boards, lay things out to scale, and play around with layouts, furniture, and color schemes without needing any Photoshop or CAD experience. It kept my whole vision organized in one place instead of scattered across a hundred screenshots and notebook sketches, and it let me test whether the wallpaper, the marble, the green metal table, and that gorgeous blue Forest Bound table would actually feel right together before a single piece was in the room. Having a friend build something that good, and getting to use it to design my own store, felt like a full circle moment.

Next time

In the next entry I am going to tell you about the weirdness, including an actual thief, and some of the funnier moments that have happened in the shop so far. I will also talk about how I have been sourcing product, what is selling and what is not, and I will start introducing you to shopkeepers around the country who carry our products. Some of their stories about why they opened their own stores, and what keeps them showing up every day, are honestly some of my favorite conversations I have had this year.

More soon.

With love and gratitude,
Harri