Some time ago, our old friend Howard Koeppel suggested that we stop in at the new antiques shop called (appropriately enough) "Antiquity," located on York Street in York Village, right across from York House of Pizza.
When we finally got around to doing that just recently, we missed meeting the shop's proprietor, Rachel Thull, in person because she was away that week, but we did get a chance to poke around inside, and we ended up chatting with 22-year-old Exandra Noble, who was filling in for Rachel.
We began by asking about her unusual name.
Her mother, she said, saw the name "Alexandria" in a magazine and simply, as Exandra put it, "took the A, L and I out of it."
And when we asked where Exandra was from, we were a little amazed at the answer, considering her youth. She lives in South Berwick now, she said, but, born in Waterville, Maine, she'd lived thereafter, in succession, in Danielson, Conn. (for nine and a half years), Detroit, Maine (for one year), Dexter, Maine (for two years), Freeport, Fla., (for a year - and where she attended high school in a town named Niceville), Hancock, Maine (for about four years) and Pittsfield, Maine - where she met her husband.
She and Phillip Noble, she volunteered, were married last July in Coburn Park in Skowhegan, a setting, with its lake and fountain, that she found "absolutely gorgeous."
"I'd always wanted an outdoor wedding," she explained - and she told us that her grandmother, a Baptist minister, had performed the ceremony.
Intrigued, we asked about the grandmother and learned that she is Deb Harrison, and that she serves as pastor at Emery's Bridge Meeting House, a little white wooden church we know that's situated next to an old fenced-in pasture in a still largely bucolic setting at the junction of Emery's Bridge Road and Hooper Sands Road in South Berwick.
She didn't know, Exandra said, how long her grandmother had been pastor there, but she remembered hearing her preach at Emery's Bridge when Exandra was only five. Counting herself and her grandparents, the congregation, she told us when we asked, now numbers nine.
Her husband, Phillip, said Exandra, works in Somersworth, N.H., at The Home Depot, and she herself dreams of becoming expert in photography. In the works for her soon, she hopes: enrolling in the photography program at McIntosh College - "to learn PhotoShop, and what computers can do."
Before we left that day, Exandra gave us Rachel's card and suggested that the best way to reach her was by e-mail.
When we gave that a whirl, Rachel called us up quite promptly thereafter and, at our prompting, told us her story.
And we were impressed!
She'd just returned, she said, from a weeklong trip to Spain and Israel, where she'd been helping out a friend, who is ill, wind his way through papers needed to get a divorce.
The friend is a dealer in South Sea pearls and ancient art; he has homes in Geneva and Jerusalem, and Rachel, who is now 40, met him about 15 years ago when she was attending an annual art and antiques show in Miami on behalf of her then-employers, a diamond site-holder in New York City.
(We had to look that term up. If we understand it correctly, a "diamond site- holder" is a diamond "manufacturer," or cutter, authorized by the DeBeers Diamond Trading Company, which controls some 90-plus percent of the diamond market, to buy uncut "diamond rough" at site sales regularly staged by DeBeers.)
Shortly after meeting him at that show, she connected that man to somebody in New York who bought one of his pearls, and he rewarded her with a $1,000 commission.
They've been doing business of that sort, back and forth, ever since.
Before that, Rachel recounted, she'd grown up in Arlington, Texas, outside of Fort Worth, earned a degree in1991 in art history from Columbia, and worked in New York for Sotheby's Auction House.
She lives in Berwick now, she said, and when we asked how she'd ended up there, she responded candidly that she'd fallen in love with a fellow from there.
He's Charles O'Brien, she said when we pressed, and he heads sales and distribution for Gritty McDuff's Brewing Company of Portland and Freeport - and you can see his picture, she added (and we could hear her laughing on the phone), on current bottles of Gritty's Scottish Ale (a seasonal brew).
The antiques shop came about when a woman who ran an upholstery shop in South Berwick had to move when her husband was transferred elsewhere; that woman turned her shop space over to Rachel (who also does reupholstering as well as chair caning), and Rachel began adding property she acquired through estate sales.
She decided to move the business to York, she reported, when she came to York Hospital for an x-ray of her thumb (we didn't pursue that story) and, on the way out, noticed a for-rent sign. The public exposure at the site available was better than what she had in South Berwick, as was the parking, so she moved and reopened last spring, on May 15.
Now, she says, she has items for sale "from 50 cents to $30,000." From her work in the jewelry business she has billionaires for customers, she adds, but she describes her shop as "not an elitist type place." If she specializes at all, she says, it's in 20th-century American items, golden oak, and Duncan Phyfe furniture.
And, yes (we almost forgot), she also manages a Rockport Shoe shop, in the Kittery Mall, for 30-plus hours a week, because that job gives her health insurance and a 401K plan.
How does she fare in low-keyed (relatively) Maine after 14 busy years in New York City?
Oh, she says with alacrity, she and Charles go to New York at least twice a month - and she keeps a rent-stabilized apartment in New Jersey for that purpose, because it's cheaper than hotel fare.
And on those trips, she gets fabric - bargain remnants, often, from a designer she knows - for use in the upholstering she does.
She told us with some guileless glee of a Duncan Phyfe loveseat that she found at a big, summer, Rowley, Mass., flea market and antiques show that she frequents. The dealer selling the seat had left it out in the rain and apparently didn't care much for it, so he let it go to Rachel for $20. She managed to get it home by cramming it into the Jetta she was driving then - and then she reupholstered it in green damask and green velvet.
If it's the one we saw in her shop, it's now selling for $750.
Little shop, lots and lots of stories...
Thanks, Howard!
And thanks, Exandra and Rachel.
