Great Barrington — In a continuation of downtown reshufflings, the former Tune Street music and electronics store at the corner of Main and Railroad streets is about to be the new home of Louisa Ellis clothing and the first ever Iredale Mineral Cosmetics store.
Louisa Ellis owner Melissa Bigarel said the Tune Street space will be renovated and repainted for a Tuesday, Nov. 1, opening after she moves her inventory from her current Main Street location across the street, where she will join forces with Iredale founder and president Jane Iredale, whose corporate headquarters are around the corner on School Street.
Iredale calls this new venture a “pilot,” and says she is partnering with someone who has “energy and creativity.” After a career in the film industry, Iredale started her line of mineral-based makeup and skincare. Iredale’s products are sold online and in spas, boutiques and shops in the U.S. and in 40 countries.
Both Bigarel and Iredale say the shop will give both the clothing line and Iredale’s full makeup line “a stage” for “helping women look their best — both our brands are about that,” Bigarel said.
Bigarel said the town’s permitting process has begun, and that she and Iredale are working with local interior designers on a shop that will also have styling rooms and a stylist and makeup artist on staff at all times.
Both women say they have confidence in the new location. “We both believe in the Berkshires and Great Barrington,” Bigarel said. They say they hope the store will refresh the energy at a corner that has gone a bit flat since Tune Street moved to a new location on State Road and the windows were papered over.
Iredale said the new shop location, on the opposite Railroad Street corner from T.P. Saddleblanket, creates a good mix.
Iredale architectural colorist, the Hudson, New York-based Carl Black, has already picked colors for a new façade and interior. Black also chose colors for Iredale’s headquarters at the former Bryant School, which Iredale renovated to maintain the building’s historic bones and features. Iredale says the new façade will be “lighter” and “feminine.”
“We want to make it beautiful, make it a real asset in Great Barrington,” Iredale said, adding that retail has been “slow in town with so many changes.” She said she also hoped the store would help every downtown business.
Bigarel said since she and her husband “fell in love with the Berkshires,” moved to town and opened Louisa Ellis in 2011, she has “coveted Tune Street’s windows,” and would say to herself, “I want those windows.” Bigarel said she contacted Tune Street as soon as she learned they were planning to move their electronics sale and repair business to a renovated house on State Road.
Both women say their merger was “organic,” since Iredale met Bigarel shopping in her store and the two started talking about the idea.
Iredale said e-commerce has changed the “retail landscape” and has moved shopping in real life into a “shopping experience” where you “go with your friends and have fun.”
Iredale’s company is, however, using technology to its advantage with, for instance, an app on the company website where one can upload photos of oneself and virtually try on different shades of makeup.
Iredale’s cosmetics are also sold exclusively at Face Haven, below Subway on Bridge Street, and Iredale says owner Sherri Keefner will continue that shop, but will “incorporate other brands — I hope she is very successful.”
And Bigarel is hanging on to her current Main Street location for a men’s store called Joe Dagget. “Refined rustic masculinity,” is how she described it: “American heritage” meets “European craftsmanship.”
In case anyone is wondering how exactly this will work in an area where many people still cling to their Merrells, Patagonias and patchouli oils, and where makeup-wearing is light and scarce, Bigarel and Iredale say they aren’t worried.
“There’s a wide variety of people,” Iredale said, like women who commute to Albany or Springfield to work. Iredale joked that, if she “didn’t have to come to work every day,” she might not wear makeup, either.
And Bigarel said Louisa Ellis is named after the main character in a short story called “A New England Nun,” written by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman in 1891. The character “used her fine china every day in a rural new England town.” And the name Joe Dagget is pulled from the same story.
Bigarel added that yes, she is catering to those women who do sometimes want to “wear skirts and heels to dinner,” though, she says, she perfectly understands that not everyone in the Berkshires wants to do that.
