above: (left) Rhonda Eleish and Edie Van Breems enjoy the view from the upper showroom of the new Eleish Van Breems flagship store on the Post Road in Westport. (right) Custom-built walnut and brass shelving, handcrafted in Pennsylvania by Amuneal, can be seen throughout the shop.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NEIL LANDINO // PORTRAIT BY JILL JOHNSON MANN
In recent decades, the story of Westport’s Main Street has been a battle between the mom-and-pop shops and the national chains that squash them. Of late, shopkeepers who have roots in Westport and an appreciation for its history are making a comeback. Westport native Edie Van Breems and Fairfield native Rhonda Eleish (both currently Fairfield residents) have dropped a firm anchor for local roots with their Eleish Van Breems Home flagship store at 177 Main Street, up the street from GG & Joe’s. “We are so excited to be here in the heart of the community,” says Edie.
The store’s construction has been a two-and-a-half-year process, with master artisans from across the globe contributing to the project, which prioritized preserving and honoring the c. 1760 building whenever possible. Behind the beautiful façade, airy interior and serene views of the river, from what was once a sea captain’s trading post, is the story of a stage meticulously set to maximize each guest’s experience.
“Guest” seems more appropriate than “customer” when describing the visitors to Edie and Rhonda’s store. Because for them, each retail space they create—from New Preston to Nantucket to Westport—is like a home they have created with meaningful, one-of-a-kind pieces and a vibe that says: breathe, browse, relax, appreciate, dream and learn.
The pair, friends since age 11 when they were classmates at Greens Farms Academy, are known for their Swedish furniture and antiques. But this store will incorporate more of an eclectic mix. “This is our grown-up space,” says Rhonda. “You know, it’s like, ‘What do you want to be when you’re grown up? This is it.’ We used to be very specifically Scandinavian antiques but we’ve never been like that in our interiors. Our interiors are always contemporary and very mixable. So as we’ve evolved in this business and as artists, we are bringing more texture and flavors and palettes into the stores. You don’t have to be one style or another. It’s really a collected interior that all works together and that’s the art in it—with pieces that move your soul and come from who you are, working in concert.”
Edie adds, “We love the idea of furniture and lamps as sculpture, and just arty.”
The store feels like a work of art, with masterful attention to each detail: 1930s floral gate by French ironmaster Edgar Brandt (he did the Escalier Mollien stair at the Louvre) leading to the courtyard, Belgian wood floors by Hudson flooring, Louis Poulsen lighting, 18th-century hand-hewn chestnut beams (original to the building), custom-built walnut and brass shelving handcrafted by Amuneal in Pennsylvania, massive marble cashier’s counter from Italy and a floating staircase to the whimsical top-floor showroom—worth a peek just for the Josef Frank wallpaper wrapping the floor and ceiling in gold flowers. Up there, customers can take in the river view while browsing the Verellen furnishing treasures.
“We want people to feel transported so when they walk through that garden gate, they’re in a little different world and they feel it,” says Edie. “That’s why we did bronze windows indoors. Even the bronze doors—to feel the craftsmanship, the weight of those. It’s like entering through a portal.”
Scandinavia is definitely still a theme, right down to the “Fika” (the Swedish version of English tea time) Bar on the lower level, where patrons can enjoy coffee and treats, and events like “book signings and Scandinavian movie nights. It’s a little surprise downstairs,” says Edie, “a complimentary Fika Bar.” Rhonda adds, “It’s a pause point for shoppers to grab a coffee, meet with clients, meet with friends. And we have a nod to the beloved Remarkable Book Shop [formerly housed in the building], with architecture, design and art books—unusual new and vintage ones, collected by Edie, who reads everything.”
History—A Centuries-Old Building and Decades-Old Friendship
Edie’s family has a direct connection to the building at 177 Main, which was originally Ebenezer Coley’s trading post in the 1700s. “My aunt, Julie Nespor Ekholm, and her sister, Roberta, grew up here,” she says. “She used to bring me here when I was a little girl, and I loved it. She would bring me through with my cousins and show us: ‘This was my bedroom, and my dad, Dr. Nespor, had a practice downstairs.’ This was in the late 1940s, early 1950s.”
From 1963 to 1995, the building, painted bubblegum pink, housed The Remarkable Book Shop—a favorite hang-out spot for Edie and Rhonda when they were growing up as artsy theater kids.
“Rhonda was the most exciting thing that happened to me in fifth grade,” recounts Edie. “She came from Vienna, with all these cool European clothes and music, and I was fascinated. Our parents became friends and we wound up being raised like sisters. We were always at each other’s homes. Our parents are very involved in the arts and culture, very New York-centric.They were always going to performances and plays and concerts. My mother had a dance company. She was an ex-New York City Ballet ballerina.”
The girls loved to browse through the books, beside Heathcliff the cat, who lived at the shop. “Our store is lighter in feel inside than the Remarkable bookstore when we played as kids, because there was a fireplace and it was much cozier,” says Rhonda. “Unfortunately, over time, that charm got dispersed when commercial retailing came into play. A lot of the original pieces, the fireplace, the mantle, the charming parts, except for the beams, were removed.”
The women were sad to see the building vacant for many years. “This is one of the last old revolutionary buildings still standing on Main Street,” says Edie, “so we felt very strongly about preserving it. It was emotional. We tried to be very sensitive to the original building. We brought it back in a very New England traditional way with the siding and the beautiful cedar shingle roof and the copper.”
Rhonda continues, “The whole idea is bringing old and new together—the warmth of European metals and organic metals and woods and textures with a traditional saltbox. We are historians, and we want to explore and bring buildings back to life and into the 21st century. So a lot of it is sustainable in the sources and the materials we used.”
The new owners managed to restore and repoint a historic gem in the foundation of the building: the chimney base. A hatch door on the main floor leads down steps to a cavernous basement with a circle of colorful cushions on the floor, where the curious and agile can admire the original handiwork of 18th-century masons.
“We left this because this is very, very rare,” says Edie, pointing out the gorgeous shimmering rock and aged wood. “This is called crib construction. You can almost imagine the trees they cut down. They placed them like Lincoln Logs on top of each other and then would pour in a base of all the river rock and then the big stones around it. They stopped doing this by like 1790. So this is really Colonial.”
The space is not open to the public but Rhonda and Edie hope to invite private groups and students, possibly through the Westport Museum and Historical Society. “We had some designers down here for a little private dinner,” says Edie. “Everyone was excited to learn about the history of the building. We thought we’d keep this as almost like a little meditation place.”
Dan Adams of Homesquare, the project’s general manager, felt privileged to be part of the team that brought Edie and Rhonda’s vision to fruition. “I love early American history, so for me the building at 177 Main Street is special because it has been a central part of Westport commerce for more than two and a half centuries,” says Dan. “The original post-and-beam framework and old stone foundation have been lovingly preserved and the new oversize windows provide spectacular views in all directions.”
Designing Women: The StorytellingBehind Eleish Van Breems
Edie and Rhonda’s ventures together have never been about business plans, spreadsheets, products and profits. They believe their vision grew out of their background in theater. “The more that we talk about how we approach things, it’s really a stage set. It’s storytelling. It’s a play,” says Rhonda.
If so, Act I takes us back to their youth. They both have been antique collectors since high school and when they began doing art shows together in New York, a working partnership clicked. “We had so much fun. We would do all sorts of funky gallery shows in odd and big, fabulous alternative spaces,” says Edie, “like the Tunnel.” She’s referring to the popular 1990s mega nightclub and admits, “We’re dating ourselves!”
“Every weekend we’d leave New York to go upstate to some crazy auction,” she continues, “and we were always redoing people’s homes and apartments. We were really obsessed with that. So we decided we would try our hand at having a store, and we found this incredible, magical building in Woodbury, an 18th-century house that was built by one of the town’s founding fathers.”
They headed to England to look for antiques to fill the store but after two weeks all they had bought was one Swedish trunk. They flew on to Sweden, where they had relatives. “We both loved Sweden and Gustavian furniture,” says Edie. “So we started talking about, ‘Well, maybe we should just focus on Scandinavian antiques.’ No one was doing it. So we got really excited and planned the entire floor plan for the Woodbury house on the plane, on a cocktail napkin.”
Of course their play also needed a starring character. “We envisioned the owner of that house as an 18th-century Swedish nobleman.
So we could have Gustavian pieces,” recalls Edie. “We imagined an Axel von Fersen character.
Once we had Axel in mind, we just went crazy. We had our story.” Apparently, Axel had caused such a stir in Europe with his affair with Marie Antoinette that he was sent away to America as an attache to Lafayette and Rochambeau, who was actually encamped in Woodbury. “So that was our Swedish connection to the 18th-century house,” says Edie, “and we thought, Oh, this is going to be fun!”
Rhonda says, “We’ve always run with our gut, our instincts, and listened to those voices.” For the Main Street store, the plot is: “very cool, elegant, but livable contemporary Nordic. The way people are living right now in Scandinavia,” says Edie.
Another character who has found his way into the story (and onto the new store’s opening invite) is Carl Linnaeus. “He was a great Swedish botanist in the 1730s and ’40s,” says Edie, “a Baroque man arriving just before the Enlightenment, who developed the classification system we still use for naming plants and animals. Scientists brought him plants and animals from all over the world. He was an incredible scientific thinker with all these crazy ideas.”
Rhonda adds, “He was a disruptor.”
Edie says, “Yes! He should have been in the Enlightenment. We love flowers and bees and nature. In one of our first show houses we ever did, we did a room based on Carl Linnaeus’s study, which was one of the best things we did in our early career.”
Carl has followed them ever since, complete with a pet raccoon on his shoulder (the real-life version survived the long journey from America to Sweden several hundred years ago and enchanted his new owner—his wife, not so much!). “Last year we decided to have Carl on Nantucket,” continues Edie. “We commissioned Tug Rice, the famous illustrator and New York cartoonist, to do our Christmas card with Carl Linnaeus pushing a Nantucket mermaid in a sleigh. Carl is going to be part of our Fika Bar branding. So we’re really excited to have him—our little protector character.”
Eleish Van Breems Home Retail, B2B, Interior Design and Books
In addition to their retail stores on Main Street in Westport and Easy Street in Nantucket (both coastal, with a clean, light aesthetic), and in New Preston (with more antiques and a country vibe), Eleish Van Breems has two business-to-business locations in Westport: 22 and 42 Railroad Place (with several showrooms, including one with a “sexy New York apartment feel”) and a more outdoor showroom at 99 Franklin Street (“Danish boat meets Santorini”).
“Everything is highly curated and edited by Rhonda and myself,” says Edie. “The retail stores are our passion projects in a way, where we can share what we discover and are excited about and hopefully inspire people in their homes.” Rhonda adds, “If you find something here in one of our stores, we can tell you the story of that piece. It’s not mass by any means.”
The pair also has a thriving interior design business. Kerry Wilson, a doctor in Southport, hired Edie and Rhonda to bring her 1830s captain’s house to life. “I chose them in part due to their access to antiques and their ability to blend old and new, and then I met them and they were so kind, down-to-earth and easy to work with,” says Kerry. “They helped to make my home a beautiful, serene space that is timelessly decorated—modern textiles but with antiques that nod to the history of the house.”
Rhonda and Edie have authored three books—Swedish Interiors, Swedish Country Interiors and Reflections on Swedish Interiors, all published by Gibbs Smith—and have another in the works.
Learn more and shop the beautifully curated selection on the Eleish Van Breems Home website: evbantiques.com
Photographs: book covers contributed; sheles and open book by Garvin Burke