About half the shop’s goods are vintage finds; half are handmade.
Dune Gift + Home, a retail space filled with handcrafted items and vintage objects, opened in November on Stoughton’s main thoroughfare. Twenty craftspeople are represented in the shop, all from North America, most from the Midwest. Shop owner Ciré Cross calls Dune part of the “Stoughton Main Street renaissance.”
Residents and visitors can walk from one end of the historic district all the way to the Stoughton City Hall Clock Tower and find anything they need. “For the past five to 10 years, there have been a core set of shops that have stayed the course and have toughed it out, and it’s set this amazing artistic situation in motion,” Cross says.
Long-running merchants include the cheese store Cheesers, clothing consignment shop The Next Generation, and kitchen and home goods supplier All Through The House. Cross herself, a 2004 Stoughton High School graduate, landed her first job at age 16 at the now-defunct Catfish River Arts & Antiques.
Items include; Hand-cut gem soap by Bell Mountain Naturals, Rainbow pin from designer Aleishla, and leather backpack by Directive.
Local craftspeople currently at Dune include Madison’s Melissa Jenkins (woven wall hangings, earrings) and Alex Clarke (woodworking), and Stoughton’s Sun & Lace (leather baby moccasins, booties) and Judith Stiles-Phelan (macramé wall hangings).
Not all products are strictly local. Jewelry designer Aleishla, who creates brass and sterling silver jewelry ($25-$90) lives and works in Puerto Rico. Pink House Natural Solutions, a purveyor of natural health and beauty products, is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Goodies at Dune range from a $5 bar of soap by Bell Mountain Naturals to a $325 moon-shaped leather backpack by Directive, a Milwaukee-based designer.
Cross, her husband, Mike, and their infant daughter, Elsie, live four blocks from Dune. Mike is a stay-at-home father who works occasional counter shifts at the store; the couple also scours thrift shops together, looking for vintage pieces.
Cross has created a separate studio where she designs jewelry (called the Ciré Alexandria line) — earrings, hair pieces, necklaces and earrings made of brass, 14-karat gold fill and semiprecious stone pieces. This work is also sold at Dune.
The store’s name was inspired by the color of a vintage sweater that Cross purchased last year. She describes dune as sandy, “almost orange almost yellow,” and an earth-tone shade. Plus, “dune is a single syllable, mysterious and easy to remember,” she says.
Dune Gift + Home
155 W. Main Street, Stoughton; dunegiftandhome.com
10 am-6 pm Wed.-Sun.; no phone
