“So many people just forget how beautiful the little, simple things are. I’m happy that I can open a shop where people come to buy those things. I’m not alone in this. There’s a whole world of people that love weird things,” says Maria Philippis, owner of Ball and Claw in Port Ewen. Philippis makes it her mission to upcycle hidden vintage treasures.
Ball and Claw opened in August after five months of renovation to a storied 1920s Dutch Colonial on Broadway in the hamlet’s downtown. Once the home of the town grocer, the building has had many lives, including a home for the sick and a dentist’s office.
Maria Philippis, who ran the popular bistro Boitson’s in Kingston for a dozen years, bought the property in January. “After I closed my restaurants two years ago, I decided it was time to start doing something else. I lived down the street, saw this property on the board for a long time, and finally just pulled the trigger and bought it,” she says.
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A multi-vendor antiques and vintage emporium, each retailer has its own section of the 3,500-square-foot house, displaying their paintings, chairs, books, and jewelry. Down a slim hallway, greeting cards of ornate still lifes and nature scenes by Art Angels line the walls in old dishware displays alongside bright and colorful cards and prints from Jason O’Malley of Rural Modernist.
In addition to in-house merchants, Philippis sources items from estate sales and any community members who are interested in selling something from their own houses. “One of my favorite ways to acquire items is when people drive up with a trunk full of stuff and they’ll say, ‘Are you interested in buying an old globe, or some old China or some jewelry?’ It’s kind of funny—I’m always looking in people’s cars,” she says.
Ball and Claw is full of “one man’s trash.” Philippis’s collection includes a baseball glove stretcher, glass figurines, and deer antlers. “I love antiques, and I see the beauty and something that’s maybe broken or dirty or discarded, and I love to bring it back to life. I hate landfills,” Philippis says.
Ball and Claw, referring to the feet of vintage furniture, is more than the name suggests. The shop is conjoined with a coffee shop where guests can order from the outside through a walk-up window or sit at one of the vintage tables with a friend or a laptop. Philippis hopes the space will become more community oriented, not just a stop and shop. “I have a 13-year-old, and I want to do a chess club where kids can come after school and play chess or have family game nights,” she says. “I feel like we’ve kind of lost a community place to go to.”
In the future, the building will host parties with a cocktail bar collaboration with Stockade Tavern currently in the works. The second floor, which is still being renovated, will also be an event space for workshops, community talks, and anything by popular demand. Philippis also plans to create a library where shoppers can stop and read a book.
While some of the walls have been painted in muted shades of yellow and pink, a neutral color palate prevails. “People come in for the colors and I hear that they’re really drawn to the soothing walls. They’re dark, but they’re not oppressive. So that’s been a big topic. I really wanted to feel that nice flow from room to room,” Philippis says. Although she doesn’t have a background in design, her metalsmithing BFA shows in the interiors and the arrangement of the antique items.
Looking into the glass cases with smaller, more fragile items, symmetry and lines leads the eyes from silverware to jewelry to gadgets. Inside one case, a collection of vintage cars stretches across the space in rainbow order. Hanging next to these cars is an old oil lamp, at one point in history, a miner’s only source of light. “That’s so crazy and beautiful that it survived. A lot of these things just got thrown into the pit in the backyard, because no one used it anymore,” Philippis says.
After vending at Field + Supply this fall, the shop has been getting a lot of traffic from locals and people visiting from New York City. “People are discovering us and then they tell their friends and everybody’s been coming back. I’m surprised at how busy we’ve been, considering we just got the sign and we’re just starting to get some publicity,” she says.
The shop is open seven days a week. From now until Christmas, Ball and Claw will host a Friday holiday happy hour from 4 to 7pm featuring wine and cheese and of course—shopping.
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