Vintage furniture and housewares shop Croft Place opens in Northport
Shop owner Nicole Napolitano at Croft Place, a boutique for secondhand furniture and housewares in Northport. Credit: Croft Place
Inviting blasts from the past are what’s in store at Croft Place, a new Northport boutique that opened April 4 featuring secondhand and vintage furniture and housewares.
Owner Nicole Napolitano carries an eclectic mix of styles and finds. "We have everything from artwork to dressers to chests to lamps to rugs," she says. "Just anything that you can fill your home or office with and feel inspired by."
Napolitano, 36, tapped her childhood address to name her first brick-and-mortar business. "It’s the street I grew up on in Huntington," she says. Found at estate sales, antiques markets and through a network of sources, the merchandise "has history too."
On opening day, pieces included a burnt orange leather club chair, a stained-glass floor lamp, towering candlesticks, and pillows repurposed from Turkish rugs. Also on hand: ceramic and wooden bowls, vases, glassware, baskets, nautical-themed books and new beeswax candles. Prices run from $10 to $1,900-plus, depending on the item.
Napolitano graduated from James Madison University in Virginia, where she studied writing. She has lived the past 12 years in New York City, working in retail and wellness fields. In 2018 she completed an interior design and architecture program at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan.
"At a retail shop in Brooklyn, I learned the industry of vintage furniture and housewares — and I really fell in love," she says. "I have always wanted to own a business, and it took me time to figure out what that was."
Napolitano introduced her Croft Place brand last year as a design-forward collaborative event bringing together vintage homewares, art, food and music.
"I rented a barn through the Historic Society in Huntington," she says. "I started in June and I did nine pop-ups from June through December."
Now, she’s made an entrepreneurial leap and returned to the North Shore. Her father scouted the shop, formerly for men’s clothing.
"I'm in this very old building that has vine growing on the glass," she says. "The cherry on top is that the village sits on the water."
For a businesswoman surrounded by vintage pieces, that’s a rush that never gets old.
Croft Place, 166 Main St., Northport, 631-239-1453, croftplace.com.
