A San Francisco seamstress turns a 1940s dry goods shop into a West Asheville craft hub.

by Jess McCuan . photos by Jameykay Young

She fell in love with the building first. When Leigh Ann Hilbert moved to Asheville in 2008, she couldn’t help but peer into the big windows of an old two-story building on West Asheville’s Haywood Road. Inside, it was piled high with sneakers from the ‘60s, old clothes, buttons, fabric bolts. “It really was a mystery to me. I like dusty, dirty old places,” says Hilbert, 35. “Usually, these kinds of buildings get knocked down.”

After a few months of asking around, the mystery unraveled. The store had once been Meadow’s Dry Goods, owned and operated by a pioneering West Asheville businesswoman, Nan Thomas, starting in 1949. When Thomas died in 2006 at age 99, the shop and its contents started collecting dust. After a few years, Thomas’s daughter, Molly Braswell, decided to rent out the space, and she had plenty of interested parties. The strip of Haywood around the building has come alive in recent years, now home to hip bars, restaurants and hair salons. Hilbert was quite persistent, Braswell says, calling about once a month. Braswell also liked the fact that Hilbert’s plan for the space honored the old shop, which was a gathering place as well as a retail operation. Thomas, whose maiden name was Meadow, sold overalls to farmers who congregated there on weekend nights.

Hilbert spent the early months of this year painting, building and scrubbing the shop’s old shelves clean. Then, in early July, she opened The DryGoods Shop, which is part retail space, part art studio and part community craft space. In the community area this month, she and other local artists have started conducting classes in things like knitting, quilting and bookbinding. Hilbert shares studio space with jewelry maker Ryan-Ashley Anderson and Jean Potter, a book artist. Painter and printmaker Dustin Spagnola rents studio space next door. In the shop, you can swap materials like buttons and fabric, and Hilbert, a fashion designer, envisions a room full of sewing machines that the public can rent by the hour.

Yes, she’s a designer, creating custom vintage-inspired dresses and tops. But she’s also been an art teacher and university costume designer. When she and her husband, an IT specialist, moved here from the West Coast, they knew West Asheville was undergoing a rennaissance. But the neighborhood seemed to be missing a communal art space, one that would be free to community members who want to stop by, work on an arty project or two, or maybe just hang out. “It’s a place I would love to see open myself,” she says of her 1,400-square-foot center, which essentially reflects her own combination of interests and skills. “There are so many people involved in art in Asheville, but not necessarily a place for them to congregate.” Until now.

To learn more about The DryGoods Shop, go to http://thedrygoodsshop.blogspot.com.