“I loved this my whole life. I’ve been antiquing with my mom since I was a kid,” says Ellen Smith, the owner of one of Newburyport’s newest businesses, Smith Sullivan, an antiques shop located at 57 Pleasant Street. The curated space, previously the home of A Pleasant Shoppe: An Artist Community, reopened in May, boasting a vision that’s in tune with the city’s Colonial and Federal homes. Named for her familial legacy—Smith is her Scottish side, Sullivan her Irish one—the store has already attracted a loyal and appreciative following.
When I first visited the space, on the night of its soft opening, I found two rare Wedgwood cheese cloches (each priced in the hundreds); a still life of watermelon and garlic in a gilded frame (since sold); ceramic lobster dinnerware; cobalt salt cellars; and sturdy wood furniture from centuries past. There is no singular item or period that directs her collectible passion, Smith tells me. “I’m sort of tempted by everything,” she says.
Smith, a Connecticut native who found herself in Newburyport, in 2022, by way of Chicago, is, in some ways, an unlikely shop owner. She spent 20 years in nonprofit management, beginning her career at a refugee resettlement organization and then using that experience to help the agency develop its programming for evacuees arriving in the state following Hurricane Katrina.
“I moved to Chicago when I was 25,” she says. “I thought I was going to live there for a couple of years and then bounce around and move to a different city.” In Chicago, she worked in international grantmaking and administration, before spending 13 years at an early childhood organization, where she was chief-of-staff to the president and, later, vice president of operations.
Smith had moved to Chicago knowing just one person, as part of a personal experiment. “We never traveled when I was a kid. I wanted to just do something new,” she says. “I knew one person there. I just wanted to explore and do something different. I never thought I would be there for 15 years.”
One thing Smith did always know about herself was that she would return to New England. After spending four years coming back and forth to Newburyport to visit friends, she settled here, in 2022. And, like so many others who decided to follow a different path amid the pandemic, Smith found herself recalculating her own career path. “I looked for jobs in the field I was qualified to continue working in, and I just got sad,” she says. “And I was, like, Well, every morning with my coffee, I go look at 1stDibs, or I look at Chairish, and this is what I do when I wake up, so what if I just did this all day?”
But opening a business—particularly in a new-to-her town—required some logistics. While she waited for the perfect space to open up, Smith began quietly collecting small pieces of inventory in her apartment: lamps, chairs, Staffordshire figures, bric-a-brac. “I didn’t see it, because I lived there, but my friends would come there and be, like, What is happening here,” she says. Sourcing from everywhere (online auction houses, local flea markets, Facebook marketplace, in-person auctions, and everything in-between), Smith has created an enviable space, which reflects plenty of the local aesthetic—and which also represents Newburyport’s history in the form of old photographs, books, and maps.
There is a tension, she tells me, that is common among the antiquing community—or at least among those who own stores. It’s a problem of feast-or-famine that I’m familiar with as a freelancer. Too much. Too little. When Smith sells a piece, she must find something else to substitute it. “I sold a little coffee table, and I don’t have anything to put in its place,” she says. “It definitely is constantly rethinking what you have and what you need, because I don’t have the resources to have a full store in the basement.”
That jigsaw puzzle—rearranging the set, making things work, finding new and fresh items, or, as Smith describes it, going down an online rabbit hole in pursuit of more historic information about an item—is also what makes the job challenging and fun. “I’m very focused on preservation and history,” she says. “I love learning about things. I have visions of eventually trying to do some sort of furniture bank, and really focusing on preserving things that already exist.”
In the meantime, however, Smith Sullivan remains a brand-new business with an old soul, a place where the residents of and visitors to Newburyport alike can enjoy a taste of history, thanks to one Ellen Smith.