Certain things run in families: red hair, or twins, for example. But there is also what writer Laurie Colwin called “house style” for families; like publishing houses, who have their own rules (their house style) about things like comma usage, she suggested that families share their own particular tastes and talents. If one ever needed an example to bolster this theory, the three generations of Megan van der Kieft’s family would provide it. Her grandmother, Margaret Bussey Moore, ran a high-end clothing store in Darien, Connecticut, for years; her mother, Marcy Moore van der Kieft, ran Margo Moore Interiors at 74 Elm Street in Camden until her death in 2020. Now Megan has added to the family legacy with her own shop on Main Street in Camden: A Little Moore, a funny pun on her family name, but also a serious venture. “My grandmother’s life experience taught her valuable lessons that she clearly wanted to pass along,” she says. “And my mother, despite her accomplishments, was very humble. I try to embrace their values here.”

Van der Kieft warms to the subject of her foremothers easily. Settling into a display armchair in her cozy showroom, she tells of how her grandmother reinvented herself as a shop owner after a painful divorce. “She bought out the previous owner within two years,” she says, “and then she ended up becoming very close friends with people like Bill Blass and Yves St. Laurent, all of these wonderful men that embraced her in the retail fashion industry.” “Then, after my parents got married and moved up here,” she continues, “my grandmother said, ‘Well, you can’t go up there without something to do.’ And she ended up buying 74 Elm Street, to make sure my mother would always have a roof over her head and her children’s heads. This was so important to her.” The business, named after Margaret (known as Margo), thrived under Marcy’s leadership. “She really found her clientele and her community here,” recalls her daughter with obvious affection. “She did her thing. She loved her people.” Initially, like the original store in Connecticut, Margo Moore focused on clothing, but the switch to interiors came naturally to her mother, says van der Kieft: “Mom’s greatest love was textile design. And so about 35 years ago, the fashion sort of fell away.”

Van der Kieft grew up at the shop. “I was born and raised in Rockport, but at 18 I left home, encouraged by my parents. In fact, they said, ‘Bye-bye, you’re not allowed back in this house!’” van der Kieft says with a laugh that shows she now appreciates their old-school parenting approach. She went first to Lasell University, then transferred to Wentworth Institute of Technology to study interior design. “Then I took a year off, and I worked at the Boston Design Center for a gentleman called David Webster, who was very old school,” she says. “But his style and his eye were so similar to my grandmother’s. He helped me refine my eye, which my grandmother and my mother had begun to do, while I didn’t even realize it, teaching me how to look at, for example, porcelain and determine whether it’s quality or not.” She also spent time at Wentworth learning facilities management and seeing how buildings worked from the inside out, an experience that she says still helps her ask the right (and sometimes unexpected) questions in design meetings with builders and clients.

After graduation, she worked around the country in a variety of jobs, but in 2008 she moved back to Maine to join her mother at Margo Moore Interiors. Sadly, her mother died early in 2020. “I had a great team when Mom passed away, a phenomenal team really, and that’s the only reason why I am standing today,” she says. “I had such a great team of women that supported me.” She relied on their support, she says, when she decided to move her business from Elm Street to the very center of Camden.

As van der Kieft explains, “This used to be the village shop, where I used to get Slush Puppies and candy when I was a young kid or run down and get staples or paper or envelopes.” She continues, “Anyhow, they were closing, and because we’re such a small town, I knew that was happening. Then my landlord renovated this whole place with Main Coast Construction. They opened up all those gorgeous windows.” The windows in question not only brighten the back areas of the shop, but they also offer spectacular views over Camden’s Megunticook Falls to the harbor beyond, where schooner masts tower over the town. One half of the now brightly lit space is devoted to displaying her interior design work, while the other half is given over to a treasure trove of gifts and home items. All have been carefully selected by van der Kieft, using the eye that she cultivated growing up with her mother and grandmother.

That legacy connection runs deep in ways both practical and emotional. “Everybody still calls me Margo. I’m not Margo, I’m Megan,” she says. “And my mother was Marcy. But that was one of the things my mother was very proud of—to be called Margo. It didn’t faze her, as it shouldn’t have. It was her mother’s name. It was beautiful. They opened those doors together.” Now van der Kieft maintains her family’s values: an eye for quality, a commitment to her community, and an understanding that business is as much about relationships as it is about transactions.