The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A biz so hot, it’s gotta have shades
Remodeled shop looks more like a showroom
For most of its 40 years, Lamp Shades Plus has been located in a low-profile storefront at 280 Boston Post Road.
ORANGE >> For most of its 40 years, Lamp Shades Plus has been located in a low-profile storefront at 280 Boston Post Road, and there are no showy window displays or light-up signs to draw in drive-by customers.
But the store doesn’t need the flash to keep business brisk, because after all these years, the interior decorators, celebrities and other style-minded shoppers look for them.
“I’ve been shopping for weeks and this is the spot,” said customer Robin Green of Guilford, who, until she walked into recently remodeled Lamp Shades Plus, couldn’t find the right lampshades to make a “statement” in her newly decorated living room.
Green said she loves the “quality, selection, fantastic advice.”
That advice of which Green speaks comes from Jill Pendergast of Orange, who took over the store about 12 years ago when her parents, Jim and Carol Tendler, retired. The Tendlers opened the store 40 years ago. Pendergast says she gets her color sense from her late mother and her electrical know-how from her dad.
The shapes, sizes, colors and fabrics of the thousands of lampshades, and some lamps at customers’ disposal, are all “right here,” Pendergast says, pointing to her head. Show her a picture of a room and she’ll find you the lampshade to make the room pop.
“I love it. There’s never a day when I say, ‘Ugh, I have to go to work,’” she said of the business. “For me, it’s a creative process. Every time we make a perfect match with a lamp and a lampshade, they walk out happy and I’m happy.”
The customers come from near and far — Massachusetts to the north, New Jersey to the south, and customers have included many celebrities such as Marlo Thomas, Martha Stewart, the late Eartha Kitt and Willard Scott. Regular clients include Yale Repertory Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, high-end hotels and many offices at Yale University.
The store’s interior recently underwent a remodeling after a leaky roof caused it to “rain in the store.”
Pendergast said although the store thrived all those years, it looked “more like a warehouse than a showroom,” and had old blackand-white tile, a musty smell, one working electrical outlet and was so cramped that it was hard to turn around.
“The store literally hadn’t been touched in 40 years,” she said.
To her delight, Pendergast said, the landlord went all-out remodeling by hiring Allways Renovation & Cleaning LLC. The store has new floors, paint, electrical outlets and other touches that make it look like a showroom after all these years, she said. Those who knew the store before are amazed at how roomy it is now, she said.
After being closed for a month, the store reopened in March.
Pendergast said there’s a lot more to the business than sales; its employees rebuild lamps, do custom orders and can make any object into a lamp — they’ve done it with musical instruments and deer antlers, for example.
“You name it and we can make a lamp out of it,” she said.
Pendergast said her grandfather was a lamp manufacturer who got her father into the sales end of the business. After winning a date with her mom “in a poker game,” she said, her parents married and went into the business in Long Island, then moved to this area to open the store.
Her husband, a physician’s assistant, helps on weekends with repairs, but prefers his day job, she said.
There are lots of clever one-liners in the business and Pendergast has heard them all: “You’re in a shady business,” and “You light up my life.”
Pendergast prefers a oneline motto: “Lamps make a room.”