Flowers And Fixtures

Walking into is like entering a small, slightly humid greenhouse, filled with luscious hanging plants and packed with colorful, fragrant flowers.

Richard Carrillo and his professional floral styling expertise have graced our area for 30 years. Tucked off Mystic’s West Main Street at 2A Pearl St., this sweet shop employs a talented staff and official greeters: Amara and Talah, boxers who peek out from the store’s open door, turning their heads in unison to attractions on the street.

Special flowers arrive daily, such as pretty pink tulips from Holland, with many showing off their beauty behind a double-door glass case that frames a live portrait of flowers bursting in purples, reds, yellows and whites. More plants and flowers hang from above in a sky of leafy green or take their place in every nook within this special little shop.

Flowers brighten any day and giving or receiving them is one special pleasure.

In Pawcatuck, you’ll find a place unlike any other around just about anywhere in the form of . This gem at 111 West Broad St. occupies a former Baptist church where owner Bill McAvoy married his beloved Betsy.

This is where you—and a lot of other people—bring that lamp you love that no longer works or has a bent harp or something is just not right about it. As McAvoy’s daughter-in-law Carolyn, who runs the store with him, said, “Lots of lamps; no one to repair them.”  

The business’s unusual name originates from a reference to land Bill McAvoy bought from an Italian gentleman in the North Stonington countryside. McAvoy said, “He would say (in halting English) that I live the far away farm,” motioning with his hand to land way beyond his own.

McAvoy began repairing lamps out of that farm house almost 40 years ago, before renting a shop on Mechanic Street. For 26 years, he’s been at this little white church, now filled to the choir loft with everything lamps—sockets, shades, finials, harps, wiring and lots of fixtures in various stages of repair.

I walked in with a favorite lamp with the intention of maybe having the harp straightened out, but Carolyn promptly pointed out that while my cylindrical Chinese-print shade was very cool, it was very wrong, as it hid some of the lamp’s pretty detail. Worried I would be stuck with something I didn’t like, (after all, we get used to how these things look), I ended up with a modern and very affordable lamp to be built for the tall shade and I selected a size-appropriate, satiny-sage shade for the original lamp that picked up color detail and showed off its distinctiveness.

There really is no other place like it.