Island Craft Shop returns to former North Hero home

NORTH HERO – After spending years in South Hero and going several months without a home, the Island Craft Shop has returned to North Hero.

The artisan cooperative reopened earlier this year in its former home in North Hero’s historic village, filling the frontmost rooms of an office shared with the Lake Champlain Islands Economic Development Corporation and the Grand Isle County Natural Resources Conservation District.

The move was, according to the Island Craft Shop’s Carley Tillinghast, a homecoming of sorts.

“We’ve been in this location more than once,” Tillinghast, the president of the Island Craft Shop, told The Islander during a recent interview. “I think this is our third trip back to this location.”

When the Island Craft Shop first opened its doors in 1991, the gallery originally claimed a room in the future home of the Lake Champlain Islands Economic Development Corporation. Before leaving, the gallery would eventually claim another room in the office as well as a shed behind the building.

Since then, the gallery has moved across the Champlain Islands, bouncing between Grand Isle, North Hero and South Hero before most recently settling in a former rescue station in South Hero in 2019.

“We’ve been a bit of a nomad,” Tillinghast said. “This is a much smaller shop.”

The Island Craft Shop is a juried gallery and artist cooperative. Because of the size of its new North Hero home, the shop currently showcases only 20 artisans from across the Green Mountain State, including several crafters based in the Champlain Islands.

For artisans like Tillinghast, a South Burlington artist previously based in South Hero who works with driftwood, small cooperatives like the Island Craft Shop could be an important node for artisans to present and sell their work. Cooperatives provided more permanent venues than craft fairs, Tillinghast said, and sometimes boasted a more favorable split in revenue between the artist and the gallery.

In an interview, Tillinghast described the cooperative as “eclectic,” with its collection paring different styles and mediums to make the most of the limited space available in its North Hero storefront.

“No two artists are really the same,” she said. “We strive to make sure that it’s not all the same.”

According to Tillinghast, the cooperative started the year without a home. As part of a redevelopment focused on building South Hero a new municipal hall, South Hero officials had asked the Island Craft Shop to leave its years’ long home in the town’s former rescue station. The station was later demolished to make room for new municipal offices the town planned to open sometime this year.

The Island Craft Shop, according to Tillinghast, struggled to find a new space after vacating the rescue station. While there were a few available buildings capable of supporting a gallery in the Champlain Islands, Tillinghast said most had been too expensive for the cooperative to afford.

It was ultimately luck, she said, that allowed the Island Craft Shop to return to North Hero and open in time for the beginning of the Champlain Islands’ summer tourism season.

“The members were sad we didn’t have a space lined up when we closed our doors,” Tillinghast said. “It was a fluke that this came together.”

In the weeks since reopening in North Hero, Tillinghast said the Island Craft Shop has fared better than it did in South Hero. Revenues at the gallery were already increasing year over year after the COVID-19 pandemic brought Vermont’s arts industry to a halt, and Tillinghast said the cooperative was optimistic that the trend would continue at the Island Craft Shop’s new home in North Hero.

The gallery expects to continue with its usual seasonal hours in North Hero, with the Island Craft Shop’s summertime hours later shifting to weekend hours in the fall until a wintertime closure in December.

“Business has been fabulous,” Tillinghast told The Islander. “We’ve made it work.”