Lured By the Aroma, You May Never Want to Leave This Valley Junction Rock Shop

First, the aroma of the little shop with a flame on its facade lures you in.

It’s a subtle, not-quite-musky, not-quite-spicy fragrance — sandalwood, maybe — hinting of the organic smell of the earth after a spring rain, or something more exotic. The scent is hard to place, and it doesn’t matter. You just know you want to breathe in that olfactory delight again.

Jewelry designer Kim Novotny gets that all the time at , the shop she operates with her husband, John, a stone mason and landscape architect turned artisan.

The second thing you notice?

This intimate little shop feels as special as it smells. Everyone remarks about that, too, Kim says, easing from a corner nook where she’s designing jewelry from stone and precious gems harvested from the earth on one or another of the couple’s adventures.

What's the story behind your favorite rock? Tell us below in comments.

“People come in and talk about how earthy it feels and smells in here, how organic it is,” she says. “It takes them into a different world. We hear people say that when they walk in, they just decompress.”

That happens a lot, too.

“We opened the shop for a variety of reasons,” John says, “and one of them was that we wanted to create a sanctuary environment. We wanted to have people come in and feel safe and warm and good and tell us their stories. People open up and do that all the time."

Memory Art Invites a Story

He says there’s a quality to natural stone that primes the reservoir where cherished memories and family stories are stored.

“It has a quality of permanence to it,” he says. “It’s just elemental and, I think, because of that, people just feel safe.”

They also want to touch it, rub their fingers across the smooth, gleaming stone that John has turned into oil lamps. They call both committed customers and curious browsers, begging to be touched, to be experienced.

The magnetism is so strong that John Novotny created a line called Memory Art. Customers bring in rocks collected from the family farm or the lakehouse or some other place with sentimental attachment and he transforms them into conversation pieces they can display in their homes or on their patios.

The idea for Memory Art came when a woman whose grief was still fresh brought in a rock from her late son’s aquarium. She had lost her husband and her daughter years before and the latest tragedy left her reeling. An oil lamp in the second iteration of its life, the rock provided light and comfort at a gathering on the anniversary of her son’s death.

Rocks a Metaphor For Life

There are other stories to be told. Whose hands touched heirloom rocks passed through the generations? Even something less heartwarming – like the head from a Sioux Indian war ax turned into a lamp for a man’s grandson – can be made beautiful.

“Rocks are such a metaphor for life,” John says, breaking the silence that had fallen over the shop as his wife told the story. “I can’t tell you how many pieces look like nothing in the beginning. When I have cut and polished them, the beauty of them is unbelievable. That’s how people are sometimes.”

The Novotnys’ story is something like the beauty of those rocks, waiting to be coaxed from the rough. John smiles at his wife, calling her the love of his life he’d almost given up on finding. She beams back in return, nods knowingly, smiles with her eyes and says “don’t give up” to anyone within earshot pondering if they’ll ever find what the Novotnys have.

A friend of both fixed them up in 2007. They were both making a living with rocks and stone, so it made sense. They married a year later at an informal backyard barbecue before flabbergasted friends who suspected it might be an engagement party, but had no hint John and Kim would exchange their vows. The two-minute ceremony was so to the point, Kim says, that one friend looked at another and asked: “Did they just get married?”

Throughout the store are rocks they’ve collected on road trips around the country – out West, Colorado, Utah, Arizona or New Mexico way, or close to home, wherever they’re adventurous hearts take them.

You’ll know when they’re gone. There will be a sign on the door that reads:

“Gone rock hunting.”