Elephant Ears, Kerrytown’s bi-level store for top-quality children’s clothing, strollers, car seats, and baby accessories, suddenly decided to pull up stakes and relocate to a smaller space in Plymouth. Matt Cyrulnik and Jenna McElroy, who founded the store in 2007, sold the business a couple of years ago to Kyle Morse and Rebecca Greene.
Karen Farmer, manager of Kerrytown Market & Shops, says she doesn’t know why Morse and Greene decided to leave. But whatever prompted the decision, it was good news for Mary Cambruzzi: She’s moving Found–the cheerfully uncategorizable shop she tags as “vintage, artisan, and eco-friendly”–into their former downstairs space in what Kerrytown calls the Luick Building. Long ago, it was called Luick Brothers Lumber Co., where horse-drawn carts loaded up building supplies to deliver to the housing boom in progress on what was then the new west side, lowercase.
Found’s new space is twice as big as its present one. It also has an independent entrance, so Cambruzzi will be able to do events like pop-up trunk shows, furniture painting demonstrations, and jewelry assembly workshops when the rest of Kerrytown is closed.
Cambruzzi opened her store a decade ago, before upcycling and repurposing were hipster buzzwords: people like her invented what is now something of a genre. “When we started there was very little of that going on,” she recalls. “There was a very clear distinction between places that sold old, vintage things and places that sold new things. But I always loved the quality of old things. They were often so much better made than reproductions. In my home, I always mixed old and new.” She carries some brand-new items–mostly gifts or jewelry by Michigan artists–but specializes in art and craft made from rescued pieces, like earrings made from old Studebaker parts and bud vases from silver-plated spoons. She also sells what she calls “art supplies” for making your own upcycled art–old shirt buttons by the cup, spools of colored string, billiard balls, eyeglass parts.
She hopes to be in the new space by the end of August.
Found, 415 N. Fifth Ave. (new address), 302-3060. Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m.-6 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. foundgallery.com.
