15 minute read
The Stuff of Dreams
There are few things you need inside Flora Bae Home, but— for anyone with a yearning heart— just about everything you could ever want.
By Lynda Wheatley
Photos by Courtney Kent
Stepping into 209 Howard St. in Petoskey is like finding yourself in what is part chef’s secret cupboard, part Sherlock Holmes-style study: a ready-for-inspection array of exotic culinary and cocktail accoutrements alongside oodles of art, books and as-yet-unsolved curios of mysterious purpose.
Flora Bae Home—its middle moniker an acronym for the shop’s botanical, apothecary and entertaining wares—doesn’t seem so much a shop as it does a small-scale arboretum, library and to-die-for living room.
Greeting you upon entry is a hello from behind the register, the lazy twang of a Chris Stapleton song overhead and a subtle olfactory shift in the atmosphere—the shop’s signature pheromone, Vancouver Candle Co.’s Muskoka, a blend of pine, cedarwood and eucalyptus, wafting from a reed diffuser one short whiff from the front door.
Along the walls—on a rustic aluminum shelf here, an oak dresser-top there—are countless opportunities for long, lingering, eyes-closed sniffs: bayberry taper candles, citronella and sea salt incense, a bergamot room spray. Opposite a wall of handmade soaps and CBD bath bombs, there’s a dainty army of parfum bottles. They’re led by several open samples, light but lush with alternating notes of white tea and peonies, saffron blossoms and suede, amber and Osmanthus-Absolute, an otherworldly sounding and scented Asian flower that’s juicy with essences of peach and pepper.
For the discriminating denizens of home-, garden- and self-care, Flora Bae is a place of infinite intrigue and possibilities.
SAnd everywhere you look—walls, floor, tabletops—there are live plants: pots of English ivy dangling from the top of an armoire’s open screen door. An amaryllis bulb lying in wait, sleeping and soil-less, behind glass. A single spotted leaf of mother-in-law’s tongue, sticking straight out of its pot on the floor, beside a basket of Turkish towels. There are air plants tucked among books, Spanish moss lounging on tables and many a ginseng ficus, their roots like fat, wizened fingers clutching beds of moss and pebbles.
For owner Natalie Bae Lauzon and the multitude of women artists, makers and entrepreneurs whose work she showcases, the Petoskey boutique is the nowobvious realization of a two-decades-long dream, one that started with a quarter-life
crisis in Chicago and peaked (or plummeted, depending on your perspective) three years ago on a couch in Colorado.
To see Lauzon today, greeting incoming customers with a broad smile as her right hand folds a just-purchased scarf into black tissue paper while the left seals the lot with a cheeky “You’ve got great taste” sticker, it’s hard to imagine her as anything but the queen of her own well-appointed boutique.
She’s dressed sharp, chic and sensibly: cropped black jacket, black blouse and black pants, the hem of the latter falling discreetly over black running shoes.
She’d held a workshop in the store the night before, would host an after-hours ladies night—with food, drinks and DJ— that evening, another workshop after close on Sunday, and though she hadn’t taken a day off in weeks, she had somehow
Previous spread: Each item that Natalie Lauzon curates for the shop is a mini work of art. She loves the whimsical design of glass cloches: “They make for a wonderful conversation piece.”
T his page: Flora Bae Home is a cabin-fever oasis in downtown Petoskey—filled with plants, botanical goods and green thumb inspiration.
are quickly approaching—ostensibly, her busiest season. “But,” she says, grinning proudly as several small groups of customers amble, oooh and ahhh their way around her store, “I’ve been busy since June. It’s ridiculous.”
The exultant scene is a far cry from the night, three years prior, in Lakewood, Colorado, when her paramedic boyfriend walked into their living room and found her balled up on the sofa, sobbing uncontrollably.
He was understandably perplexed. Lauzon wasn’t hurt. Hadn’t broken anything. No sign of blood or a contusion. She had simply done what she’d been doing most every night since the pandemic started: watched an episode of “Schitt’s Creek,” an irreverent comedy series that had been keeping her laughing since the real world around her had shut down. The episode she’d watched—in which a certain beloved character opens his own apothecary shop in the small town of Schitt’s Creek— was a particularly joyful one.
So why the crying?
“Because,” Lauzon wailed, tears flowing hard, “that’s what I should be doing. That’s my dream.”
Worth noting: At the time of her on-couch crisis, Lauzon, then age 43, was working the first job she thought she could make a career of—as the on-campus events coordinator for Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
By all indications, she was at the top of her game. She’d wowed the school’s administration and wildly creative faculty, facing off against the pandemic and turning every in-person event she’d already planned into miraculously well-attended, fun and engaging virtual ones. She didn’t know it then, but she was about to win an award for her work.
There on that couch, however, Lauzon felt like a failure. She had a marketing degree from Columbia College in Chicago. She’d lived in five different cities and had worked well more than a dozen interesting jobs. But for the last 20 years she’d dreamt of only one thing: opening her own boutique.
And she hadn’t done it.
managed to plan, arrange and post a dozen forthcoming 2023 workshops on her website a few days prior.
She’s tired but happy.
“I’m kind of a perfectionist,” she says, then rolls her eyes. “For some reason, I just can’t be normal. I have to do everything. It’s all or nothing.”
Right now seems to be a lot of everything. The holidays
Maybe her boyfriend had tired of Lauzon’s obsessive home tweaking. Her wine-, food-, musicand atmosphere-directing whenever they entertained (which was often). Her habit of turning bedrooms into dens into dining rooms. The perpetual “remerchandising” of items on their bedroom walls, living room shelves, fireplace mantel and any other horizontal or vertical plane that caught her fancy.
More likely, it was because he’s a paramedic—a guy with an unflinching eye on the limited time humans have and a firm grasp on the life-or-death necessity of logic in
navigating crises—that he recognized something Luzon couldn’t: When you see somebody choking, you don’t delve into how hungry they were, what they ate or why they hadn’t cut it into smaller pieces. You simply remove the obstruction, so they can breathe.
“Well, let’s do it then,” he told her. And so they did.
Perspective is a funny thing. Lauzon left home in Michigan at age 18 to attend art school in Chicago because, she says, “I knew I was destined for bigger things.”
But by age 25, still in Chicago and working as a bartender, Lauzon’s view of her future seemed less clear. She had great friends and a fantastic (cozy, character-rich and well-decorated) apartment, but she felt no closer to achieving those “bigger things,” or even knowing what they were.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to figure out my life.’” She decided she needed to throw herself into a completely new world. Without a job, apartment or any connections lined up, she got rid of everything she owned except what she could stuff into her metallic blue Honda Civic, and she moved
alone to Los Angeles. “I felt like that was the push I needed to figure out where my life was going,” she says.
Lauzon would go on, as she says, to “dabble in a million things.” She worked for a startup company, in restaurants and boutiques, at an Italian wine import company. For a while she worked in film—visual effects and after-effects—as a production coordinator, and for many, many years, as a floral designer and events coordinator.
“And when I look back, actually, now that you ask me, I think that’s where [the idea of running my own business] started for me, in California, when I started working for women on their small businesses.”
Hindsight being what it is, Lauzon couldn’t see—neither in California in the early aughts nor on that couch in Colorado in 2020—that her seemingly disparate dabbles were, in fact, rigorous, comprehensive training for Flora Bae Home. She saw only failure.
“I was constantly beating myself up. And, well, I’m a twin, so first of all, I have someone in my life who works so differently. She’s been a teacher since the day she graduated from college. And she was the one who got married, has kids, and I’m like, the crazy one, the wild sister who moves every five years and has had a million jobs and isn’t married and doesn’t have kids—even though that was what I thought my life was gonna be, and I really thought that’s what I wanted.”
But marriage and kids weren’t what Lauzon wanted. What she wanted, what kept her mind clicking and her heart humming and her path ping-ponging all those years, was owning her own … something: “I just wanted something that I could put my hands in and say this is mine, where I was creating an atmosphere that people would walk into and be like, ‘Wow,’” she says. “To be wowed and feel comfortable and invited in and warm. That was all I knew.”
That’s a lie.
She knew a lot more. She just didn’t know that she did. Until she started doing it.
But back to the pandemic. At the height of global panic and economic free fall, Lauzon stopped feeling afraid.
“The only thing that held me back from [opening my own business] for 20 years—I mean, I dreamed about this for 20 years—was the fear,” she says. “The fear of not succeeding, of choosing the wrong location, the wrong time, just so many different fears. I just kept feeling like, ‘No, I’m not ready,’ or ‘No, it’s not the right time.’”
Her first realization: “It’s never going to be the right time.”
Her second: “I always thought [my business] was going to be in a big city.”
Following “Schitt’s Creek” episode No. 33 (re: beloved character, small shop, small town), however, she reconsidered.
A few months later, while playing detective online around 2 a.m., a listing for a historic general store for sale in Walloon Lake, Michigan, popped up on Lauzon’s screen. Not long after airlines resumed flights, she flew out to see it. Charming, rich with character and history, outfitted with an apartment up top and a gorgeous setting around, the building was everything she had ever dreamed of. But maybe too much.
She balked. “I wasn’t ready for that big an undertaking.” No matter. The trip to Walloon had confirmed Lauzon’s conviction that her dream would bloom if planted in a small town. The idea of a shop Up North, in her home state, took on a new urgency. She rewrote her business plan and refocused her sights. Traverse City? The rents, too high. She looked at Harbor Springs. Beautiful, somewhat more affordable, but it was already too late, she says: “I fell in love with Petoskey.”
People her age, families, natural beauty, thriving tourism, a gorgeous downtown already full of great shops, and not a one in the style she envisioned hers. “I felt like it was an open lane for me,” she says. Then, another triumph: She found the perfect space, ecstatically signed the lease, and began envisioning how she’d shape every inch of the store’s interior in her mind.
And then she learned, for much of the first year of her shop’s upcoming occupancy, a massive construction project would be underway on the floor above it.
Deal canceled, dream dashed yet again, Lauzon sank back into her couch in Colorado, and many more hopeless nights ensued. Self-doubt crept in. Maybe the time wasn’t right. What was she thinking, trying to buy buildings or lease spaces in small towns 2,000 miles away? The universe kept trying to tell her no: Stay on that tear-drenched couch. Keep that steady job. Stability IS success.
The universe seemed to power down her dream entirely the day a property manager in Petoskey took Lauzon, still in Colorado, on a remote video tour of a narrow, shotgun-style space wedged next to an even narrower alley on Howard Street.
Lauzon saw that the space had a cash register and ceiling fans and a big front window but admits she struggled to focus on any of those pluses. Because, one, “I was bawling my eyes out the entire time.” And because, two: “My heart had already fallen in love with the other space.”
Besides, who in their right mind would sign a lease for a shop in a century-old building 2,000 miles away? One that was clearly not what she wanted, envisioned or loved. One that she hadn’t even stepped inside.
Remember that thing about perspective? It can be extra funny sometimes.
Two years ago this month, while working remotely for her job in Colorado, Lauzon began scraping, painting, ripping up carpet, hanging wallpaper and bringing her longheld dream to life inside the exact space on Howard Street she had been so certain was wrong.
Not long after, on a dreary, bitterly cold spring day, the Petoskey Chamber held a ribbon cutting for Flora Bae Home. A small handful of people, bundled in winter parkas and pandemic masks, braved the temperature to celebrate— very proud twin sisters among them.
On the day Flora Bae Home opened to the public, in May of 2021, the owner of Mettler’s across the street, sent flowers to Lauzon’s store.
“I don’t think if I opened anywhere else in the world, it would be like this,” Lauzon says.
Every month since, Flora Bae’s fanbase has grown significantly. Women artists, makers and fellow business owners may be at the top of the list. Lauzon estimates that 99
percent of everything sold in her shop comes from a woman’s hands or a woman-owned business.
To be fair, most shoppers probably aren’t flocking to Flora Bae because it specializes in women-made wares. (Although there are many fervent followers, like the woman who drives from Mackinaw City to shop Flora Bae every Thursday, or the lady from Milford, Michigan, who asked Lauzon to walk her around the store by live video feed when a storm prevented her from shopping in person.)
Quite frankly, to the average shopper, man or woman,
Flora Bae seems to specialize in one ageless, genderless, priceless thing: cool stuff.
And Lauzon isn’t much concerned whether that stuff is sold in her shop—or in a store around the corner. If it’s something she loves that another business has for sale, like a bottle of whiskey and a cigar from Ernesto’s Cigar Lounge up the block, or olive oil from Fustini’s across the street, she will (and has) used Flora Bae to promote it.
“This idea about collaboration over competition isn’t new—it’s been talked about a lot over the past five years,” she says. “The impact from one person will always be less than the impact that two people or more can have … and no one wants to go shopping in a town where every store has the same thing. I think it’s important to pay attention to what other boutiques in your area are doing and set yourself apart—but collaborate in a way that is beneficial to all parties.”
Of course, not everyone sees it that way. Retail, art, entrepreneurship, big business or small—none is a quick or easy road to success. But Lauzon, a girl who once knew she was destined for bigger things, then spent the next 20 years zig-zagging across the nation, wondering if she’d been wrong, understands.
Sometimes comedies can make you cry. Crises can be launchpads. A worldwide panic can make you fearless. And what looks like ping-ponging and job-hopping and never settling down might just be not settling
It’s all a matter of perspective.
And given enough time—or maybe some frank advice from a level-headed guy who simply wants to find his bed in the same room he left it—we’ll all find our way eventually.
Lynda Wheatley is an award-winning writer specializing in stories that showcase Michigan travel and recreation, history, and the passionate folks who make this place so extraordinary. ltwriter.com
Courtney Kent is a photographer based in Traverse City. She loves exploring Northern Michigan with her husband and young son. Courtney specializes in wedding, family and lifestyle photography. courtneykentphotography.com
