Shopper Blog: The Cottage Door, a longtime Fountain City antiques store, is closing at the end of March
HALLS
The Cottage Door, longtime Fountain City antiques store, is closing
Al Lesar, Shopper News
Saying goodbye for the second time isn’t getting any easier.
When Charlotte Jellicorse walked away from the world of finance in 1993, she was looking forward to a peaceful retirement.
That lasted until 2007 when Jellicorse, a 1964 Halls High School grad, Elizabeth Donaldson (who graduated from Halls in ’66) and two others opened The Chic Shack.
“It was a tea room and antique store,” Jellicorse said of the Tazewell Pike business. “There was a lot of traffic, but people were always in a hurry to get somewhere. Nobody was stopping in.”
A few years later, Jellicorse and Donaldson found a new location, at the corner of Tazewell Pike and Jacksboro Pike, and rebranded the store as The Cottage Door Antiques and Gifts.
“We made a lot of good friends in the 14 years that we’ve been open,” said Jellicorse. “But now, it’s time. We’ve come to the realization that it’s time for us to close down.”
Jellicorse said family concerns are causing her to focus her time in other directions.
“What I need to do for my family supersedes anything else,” she said.
Antiques come full circle
It will likely be the end of March when the Cottage Door closes for the final time. Between now and then, Jellicorse said everything in the store is 25% off.
“We’ve always had the best prices around,” Jellicorse said. “Now, people are really getting a deal.”
Jellicorse said the top items her shop has now are glassware and furniture.
“Younger folks have become more interested in glassware,” she said of the trends. “Antiques, like life, is a circle. Liz has always been good finding furniture. I have a knack for the quirky things. I’ll go to a sale somewhere and find something that makes me say, ‘I’m sure someone would love this.’”
Jellicorse said she regularly has friends/customers stop in to sell something to her for the store. After a while, she had to become more particular.
“If something wasn’t in good shape, we couldn’t buy it just because we felt sorry for the person,” she said. “We try to cater to everybody. Over the years, we realized we couldn’t fix everybody.”
Rekindling memories
There were no preconceived notions that anyone was going to get rich when The Cottage Door opened.
“It’s a fun business,” Jellicorse said. “You can’t always count on making enough to pay the mortgage. If you’re big enough and you have a lot of renters (with booth space), you might be able to make a living.
“That’s not the reason you do something like this. You have to love estate sales and yard sales. You have to always try to buy things at a price that you can make money from.”
Jellicorse said they would bargain on the big items, but not the small.
She talked about a recent sale she made to a younger customer. They were odds and ends teacups and saucers for a child’s party.
“I said ‘You must have enjoyed your time with your grandparents,’” she said. “They were trying to re-create the feeling, the time they had.”
Until the end of March, The Cottage Door Antiques and Gifts will be open Tuesdays noon-4 p.m. and Wednesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
OPINION
Pajamas take center stage
Leslie Snow, Shopper News
I’m at the Miami airport with my husband waiting to catch a flight to St. John for a much-needed vacation. I have a book in my lap and my eyes are scanning the pages, but I can’t focus on the words. There’s too much to see at the airport. Too many people to watch and too much activity to observe.
While I’m sipping coffee and pretend-reading, I notice a family of four studying their boarding passes. The parents are in their mid-30s and the two children, a boy and a girl, look to be about 8 or 10 years old. They’re a sweet looking family, happy and excited for vacation, I guess, and in most ways, they’re unremarkable. I might not have noticed them at all if they weren’t wearing their pajamas.
All four of them, including the adults, were wearing furry wide-leg pajamas festooned with colorful animals, snow-skiing bears, and rainbow unicorns. I chuckled to myself, assumed they had a monumentally early flight, and didn’t give it another thought until I saw another family wearing pajamas.
I put down my book and studied the crowd. Pajamas were everywhere. I turned to my husband and whispered, “Pajamas are having a real renaissance, aren’t they?”
He assumed that was a rhetorical question, but it wasn’t. Because the more I thought about it (and who wouldn’t want to pass the time contemplating the role of pajamas in our lives), the more I realized it was true. We’re living in the pajama glory days.
In my own life, pajamas in their many forms dominate my post-COVID wardrobe. I have the classic pajama, the kind I sleep in at night, but that’s only the beginning.
Because when I wake up in the morning, I simply trade my sleeping pajamas for my morning pajamas. And while “morning pajamas” also have a fancy name, like “athleisure wear,” they are really just pajamas that I wear to walk my dog or go to the grocery store.
And when I come home from a morning of exercising and running errands, I shower and put on my next set of pajamas. I call those my dress pajamas.
Dress pajamas are made of soft fabrics and often have a lovely matching jacket or cardigan. I wear them when I go to lunch with my mother or to the mall, and when I do, people always compliment me.
“I love your outfit,” they say, and I reply, “Thank you! The world has given me permission to wear pajamas in public and I have accepted the challenge.”
Most people laugh. They get the joke because they’re wearing pajamas, too.
I even have a pair of emerald-green crepe pajamas that I wear when I go downtown on a Saturday night for dinner and a show. Those are my formal pajamas. I save those for special occasions.
I’m not sure what to make of our more casual dress code. I’m not sure what I think of full-grown adults passing through airport security wearing fuzzy Captain America pajamas, but I get the impulse. I understand the need to be comfortable as we rush through our busy days. COVID changed the way we think about clothing, and four years later, pajamas are all the rage.
For Christmas last year, I got a cute pair of slippers that I wear around the house. When my daughter-in-law Amanda saw them, she assured me it’s OK to wear them in public.
I laughed at the thought and said, “Great! I have the perfect pair of pajamas to wear with them.”
Leslie Snow may be reached at snow column@aol.com.
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