‘End to a beautiful era.’ Cambria art gallery, gift shop is closing after 24 years
After nearly a quarter century in Cambria, Charlotte Reese is hanging up her shells, beads and stones, and closing up Heart Glass Gallery & Gift Shop.
The art gallery and gift shop, which also serves as a working studio, will close its doors in January, said Reese, who announced her decision to shutter the store on Facebook.
It’s “an end to a beautiful era,” friend Sheerin Hayden commented on the Facebook post, adding later that the “cute shop with Charlotte at its helm was a fabulous piece of history in our sweet little town! Sad to see it go.”
Heart Glass Gallery opened in 1995 at 2601 Main St. at the intersection of Main Street and an unnamed, one-block roadway that some locals call Hampton Court. The quirky, pinky-purple stucco building once housed Hampton’s Service Station.
After being in a couple of other locations, the store has been for decades halfway between Santa Rosa Creek Road and Bridge Street, just outside the busy commercial East Village district. That’s been part of the problem for Reese as she’s promoted her business, she said.
The other factors in her decision to close, she said, are Cambria’s restriction on signage that would have alerted prospective shoppers about her store, and, in the past few years, a drastic reduction in holiday season sales.
Reese attributes the decrease in sales to the way the Cambria Christmas Market alters traffic and shopping patterns.
December sales at Heart Glass Gallery were quite good in the years before the Cambria Christmas Market set up shop on the grounds of Cambria Pines Lodge, Reese said. Since the market opened, she added, her holiday “business has been dropping like a rock.”
In town, “We might see one tenth of the 30,000 people who come for the market,” she said.
“I haven’t made a profit in three months,” Reese said, an unsustainable financial model for her.
“It used to be that art mattered to people,” Reese said with a sadly pensive tone in her voice. “Handmade used to matter. Now, whether it’s plastic or not, lots of people don’t care anymore. They’ll just go to Walmart.”
She said other entrepreneurs in town echo those sentiments. “There are lots of people crying, just like me,” Reese said.
“But I’m going to stop fighting the battle. I can’t survive it. I can’t even qualify to refinance the house” she bought 13 years ago on Bridge Street. So she’s going to sell it.
Her mother, Elizabeth Reese, who made payments for more than four years on the house they shared, died in November. That’s another reason for Charlotte Reese’s decision to pull up stakes and start over someplace else.
Reese plans to move to Brookings, Oregon, a small coastal town near the California border.
She wants to sell crafts and art online or at craft shows, and then try to relocate her gallery to the town’s art walk area.
“They really promote their craft businesses in Brookings,” she said. “That sounds good to me.”
Reese plans to close Heart Glass Gallery sometime in January.
She said shoppers who stop by between now and then will get substantial discounts starting at 25% off clothing and 10% off everything else.
Her stock includes art, antiques, furniture, jewelry, plants and jade and other stones.
