1 Photo
Cristina Buckley and her mother, Linda Buckley, will open B Vintage on Main Street in East Hampton Village on November 1. B VINTAGE
The first-ever offseason pop-up in the Anchor Society’s Winter Shops program will open on Main Street in East Hampton Village on Friday, November 1.
B Vintage, which offers housewares and gifts including lamps, furniture, linens, tableware and dishware, mirrors and vintage artwork, is a step toward fulfilling Anchor Society’s mission to revitalize downtown East Hampton Village for year-round residents who lament the many stores that sit vacant throughout the long off-season. The pop-up, in the building at 79 Main Street occupied seasonally by Alice + Olivia by Stacey Bendet, will remain until April 1.
Cristina Buckley, a former design director for the Manhattan-based Schumacher & Co. interior design firm who now heads her own wallpaper and fabric design business, and her mother, Linda Buckley, who ran the Finds antique shop in the village in the 1990s and designed cosmetics packaging for Revlon and Estée Lauder, are the pop-up’s proprietors.
“I had read about the Anchor Society a couple of years ago,” Cristina Buckley said last week. She happened to meet Bess Rattray, a founder of the group, and with her mother attended its June 15 summer social. “We both thought it sounded like such a great initiative.”
Members of the Anchor Society’s board, she said, told them that in surveying year-round residents, “the first thing they say they would love to have is some sort of antiques store — homewares, somewhere you can go in and browse, pick up a gift for someone, something for your house.” The mother-daughter team “looked at each other and thought, that could be amazing,” she recalled.
Inveterate collectors, they “both have basements full of things,” the younger Buckley said. “Right now, most of the inventory is things that we’ve been collecting and holding on to for one reason or another, but we are going to be looking specifically to bring in more things for new inventory as we sell through.”
Linda Buckley “has a really big collection of antique perfume bottles” from her career, her daughter said. “I also love vintage holiday ornaments, so am planning on bringing Christmas tree ornaments, which I love.” These will be useful for the holiday spirit decorating contest that the Anchor Society is cosponsoring, with judging set for November 30. “It’s going to be interesting for us to see what people gravitate toward, what people are looking for, and we’ll try to bring in more of whatever that category is.”
Linda Buckley has been a year-round resident since the 1990s, said her daughter, who herself relocated from Manhattan more recently, after spending summers and weekends here from birth. “We’ve seen a lot of changes in the village in terms of the kind of shopping, the kind of stores,” she said. “It used to be so great, with all the mom-and-pop shops. … Now, of course, it’s all big-name chain stores and as we all know, so many of them are shutting down for the offseason. It’s not great for the character of the town and walking around in the offseason. For people who are here year-round, there’s nowhere to just buy simple items.”
The owners of the building, the Flach family, were consulted and allowed its subletting, Rattray said. “We have one Newtown Lane commercial landlord on the Anchor board and talk regularly with a few others in the business district,” she said, the idea being that “it’s good for all to have doors open in winter.”
The Anchor Society, Cristina Buckley said, “negotiated a very reduced rent for this space,” and she had to buy insurance covering the pop-up’s occupancy.
“Other than that, it was a pretty smooth process. Alice + Olivia had some approval as to who would be coming in here, and I think everyone felt like this was a good fit.”
Alice + Olivia officials “have been great,” she said. That shop will return next year.
The Anchor Society is pursuing its goal on three fronts, Rattray said. One is a general store that would offer practical products and services while also serving as a community gathering space. Another is research into “how the business districts are used,” she said, “like, what’s open, what’s closed, which sorts of stores are represented in the village and what may be lacking.” The third is “test-runs with new potential solutions for the sterility that kind of hangs over the business district in the off-season, when there are too many closed doors and ‘See you in spring’ signs.”
The Anchor Society’s board “is extremely enthusiastic about B Vintage,” Rattray said, as it represents a concrete step toward its goal. “The Winter Shops program is off and running. We are planning to open another one in a few months.”
