fbpx
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Sign up for Free Newsletter
  • Print Edition
    • Get Home Delivery
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
    • Advertise
    • Customer Support
    • Submit A News Tip
    • Where’s My Paper?
  • Manage HV1 Account
Hudson Valley One
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Featured Events
      • Art
      • Books
      • Kids
      • Lifestyle & Wellness
      • Food & Drink
      • Music
      • Nature
      • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
    • Editorials
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Help Wanted
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Podcast
  • Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Featured Events
      • Art
      • Books
      • Kids
      • Lifestyle & Wellness
      • Food & Drink
      • Music
      • Nature
      • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
    • Editorials
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Help Wanted
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Podcast
  • Log In
No Result
View All Result
Hudson Valley One
No Result
View All Result

Lilly Rae in the Hamlet brings natural skin care, local treats to Highland

by Frances Marion Platt
March 3, 2020
in Business
0
Lilly Rae in the Hamlet brings natural skin care, local treats to Highland

Renae Martin is the proprietor of Lilly Rae, a gift shop featuring locally made products located at 14 Commercial Avenue in the hamlet of Highland. One of her best selling items is the sampler she is holding in the photo. (Photo by Lauren Thomas)

Renae Martin is the proprietor of Lilly Rae. (Photo by Lauren Thomas)

“You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy local, and that’s kind of the same thing.” So says a hand-lettered sign posted in front the newest retail shop to add its allure to the ongoing revitalization of downtown Highland. Called Lilly Rae in the Hamlet, it’s located in a tiny wooden building that oozes with history, just on the periphery of the walkable town center at 14 Commercial Avenue.

For proprietor Renae Martin, a Highland native who launched Lilly Rae in October 2018, the 300-square-foot shop with adjoining roofed breezeway was exactly what she’d been looking for. “I loved this space when I came in,” she relates. “I’m very sentimental, and I love this town and its history. This was the site of Riverside Coal. The shop building is the original coal office, from around 1900. The original coal storage building is still standing out back.”

According to Martin, she “worked in retail management for a very long time” before settling down to be a stay-at-home parent to her four children. With her youngest daughter Emily now “11 going on 30,” she felt ready to get back into business. It was while picking up Emily at her dance lessons at Gina Marie’z Academy of Performing Arts that Martin noticed the “For Rent” sign on the little building two doors down. It was “meant to be,” she decided.

Specifically, Martin needed a place to sell her growing line of natural skin care products that she had started making in a spare bedroom — “my little laboratory” — about four years ago and selling to acquaintances via word-of-mouth. Emily was being treated for both ADHD and epilepsy, and her mother wasn’t happy with the amount of medications that her daughter had to take. As an alternative treatment approach, Martin says, “I looked into essential oils. I read everything I could possibly find, and started making lotions and lip balms to help supplement her meds. They worked wonders.”

Word spread quickly among the dance parents, and soon Martin found herself being commissioned to create custom blends. A pain cream that she sells, for instance, was “developed for my Mom, who gets terrible migraines. She also has fibromyalgia and had her hips replaced.” From therapeutic salves and lotions and lip balms, Martin branched out into handmade herbal soaps, skin scrubs, bath teas, massage oils, scented soy candles and a host of other products for self-care and relaxation, all made from all-natural ingredients — locally sourced, whenever possible.

She came to realize that, amidst the plethora of cute shops that have been popping up in recent years, luring tourists to the Highland hamlet, a place with an old-fashioned general store atmosphere was one of the missing pieces. “We don’t have a little country shop that sells a little bit of everything local,” she says — or didn’t, until Lilly Rae opened its doors. She was considering customizing an old bus to serve as a mobile shop, but then the former coal depot office beckoned.

The shop has woodgrain-laminate flooring that evokes a 19th-century dry-goods store. There are homespun curtains in the windows, and on a counter next to the door sits the original scale that was used to display the weight of coal-laden trucks parked in what is now the breezeway. Martin has broken up the simple rectangular space with vintage furniture; an assortment of Harney & Sons Teas, for example, is displayed on a shelf suspended from an old iron headboard salvaged from a Roaring Twenties-era B&B. Old dressers serve as counters, and various collections of wares are displayed in baskets. It’s a romantic kind of clutter, with a thousand things to discover.

Not every product to be found in Lilly Rae is made locally — Martin confesses to a longtime fondness for McCall’s candles, for example — but the majority of them come from quite close by. She gets her pickles from Corey’s in Montgomery, maple syrup from Corey’s Sugar Shack in Highland, jams, salsas and butters from local home chefs, biscotti from Bella’s, honey products from 3 Hives Honey “up the road” — including honey sticks in a dozen flavors that the kids from Gina Marie’z consider “better than candy,” she says. For $22, you can get a boxed assortment of samples of these local treats, called A Taste of Highland, that makes a great souvenir or gift for a nostalgic expat.

Martin’s line of skin care products is meant to appeal to men as well as to women. Using a detergent-free base and intriguing scent combinations, she makes a soap for just about every potential application — acne-prone skin, eczema, exfoliant, relaxant, sensitive skins — including several formulations specifically for “beardiful” men. Her black pepper/vanilla/juniper/cypress/vetiver soap is designed for reducing beard odor, for example, and she carries a line of wooden beard combs, handmade in Fishkill, to go with it. Coal Miner, “my tribute soap to this property,” has a masculine scent and contains activated charcoal for detoxifying.

Lilly Rae in the Hamlet is a fascinating place to explore, offering an imaginative selection of merchandise most unlike your usual twee village gift shop. There’s even a self-serve coffee bar; and come springtime, some of the activity will move into the breezeway space, which has a big picnic table that can be used for make-your-own lotion parties. “Like Sip & Paint,” Martin explains — only you go home with something you can actually use up, not another amateur painting in need of storage. She envisions the outdoor space hung with flower baskets, and there’s enough space in the front yard for café tables. “I can’t wait,” says Renae Martin.

Winter hours for Lilly Rae in the Hamlet are from noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, noon to 7 p.m. on Thursday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Visit the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ilovelillyrae.

Tags: members
Thank you for reading Hudson Valley One. We rely on your support to continue providing local, substantive news. Please check out our subscription options to keep local journalism alive in the Hudson Valley.
- Geddy Sveikauskas, Publisher
Previous Post

Cliffs and waterfalls in the Catskills

Next Post

The long, twisty career of film director Peter Bogdanovich

Frances Marion Platt

Frances Marion Platt has been a feature writer (and copyeditor) for Ulster Publishing since 1994, under both her own name and the nom de plume Zhemyna Jurate. Her reporting beats include Gardiner and Rosendale, the arts and a bit of local history. In 2011 she took up Syd M’s mantle as film reviewer for Alm@nac Weekly, and she hopes to return to doing more of that as HV1 recovers from the shock of COVID-19. A Queens native, Platt moved to New Paltz in 1971 to earn a BA in English and minor in Linguistics at SUNY. Her first writing/editing gig was with the Ulster County Artist magazine. In the 1980s she was assistant editor of The Independent Film and Video Monthly for five years, attended Heartwood Owner/Builder School, designed and built a timberframe house in Gardiner. Her son Evan Pallor was born in 1995. Alternating with her journalism career, she spent many years doing development work – mainly grantwriting – for a variety of not-for-profit organizations, including six years at Scenic Hudson. She currently lives in Kingston.

Related Posts

Village of Saugerties planners hold public hearing for Dragon Inn
Business

Village of Saugerties planners hold public hearing for Dragon Inn

May 18, 2022
Bubbe’s Deli opens in Gardiner’s former Mountain Harbor
Business

Bubbe’s Deli opens in Gardiner’s former Mountain Harbor

May 13, 2022
Woodland Pond application complicated by a 2007 lawsuit settlement
Business

Woodland Pond application complicated by a 2007 lawsuit settlement

May 11, 2022
Woodstock club can open its beer garden, but without musical amplification
Business

Woodstock club can open its beer garden, but without musical amplification

May 10, 2022
Free Comic Book Day and grand re-opening of World’s End Comics
Business

Free Comic Book Day and grand re-opening of World’s End Comics

May 9, 2022
Ollie’s Pizza of High Falls to reopen Tony’s in Kingston
Business

Ollie’s Pizza of High Falls to reopen Tony’s in Kingston

May 10, 2022
Next Post
The long, twisty career of film director Peter Bogdanovich

The long, twisty career of film director Peter Bogdanovich

Trending News

  • Bubbe’s Deli opens in Gardiner’s former Mountain Harbor 1.7k views
  • The moon is down in Central Hudson 739 views
  • Ryan and Molinaro run for Congress, Gallagher available to move up 320 views
  • School budgets cruise to approval 308 views
  • Village of Saugerties planners hold public hearing for Dragon Inn 300 views







Latest HV1 Podcast

Weather

Kingston
◉
57°
Light Rain
5:31am8:13pm EDT
Feels like: 57°F
Wind: 2mph NW
Humidity: 69%
Pressure: 29.89"Hg
UV index: 0
ThuFriSat
68/48°F
82/63°F
97/68°F
Weather forecast Kingston, New York ▸

Ulster County COVID-19 Active Cases

Subscribe

Independent. Local. Substantive. Subscribe now.

×
You have free article(s) remaining. Subscribe for unlimited access.
View Subscription Offers Sign In
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Sign up for Free Newsletter
  • Print Edition
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
  • Manage HV1 Account

© 2022 Ulster Publishing

No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Featured Events
      • Art
      • Books
      • Kids
      • Lifestyle & Wellness
      • Food & Drink
      • Music
      • Nature
      • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
    • Editorials
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Help Wanted
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Podcast
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Contact Us
    • Customer Support
    • Advertise
    • Submit A News Tip
  • Print Edition
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
    • Where’s My Paper
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Log In

© 2022 Ulster Publishing