Perched at the western edge of the busy part of Commercial Street, the multicolored volumes of a historic factory are a familiar sight to anyone who travels over the Casco Bay Bridge between Portland and South Portland. The building was once home to the Portland Star Match Company, where women worked in the packing room packaging matches into boxes and wrap- ping them for shipping. The tenants are more varied today (a nonprofit, a law firm, a cosmetic spa), but anchoring them at one end of the building is a generous and unusual space: Home Remedies, an interiors showroom that also houses a full-service home decor workroom for custom upholstery. It’s the brainchild of Rachel Ambrose, a lifelong fabric and interior decor enthusiast. “My concept from the very beginning was that I wanted to have a fabric store that also showed what you can do with fabrics,” she explains. “I wanted to have a workroom, on-site, making things, and have people be able to see that, because I think the transformations that happen with reupholstery are so inspiring. I wanted to be like an open kitchen in a restaurant.”

Home has always been a resonant subject for Ambrose. “When I was growing up, my dad was a corporate guy, so we moved a lot. The only place that was constant in my life was our summer cottage in Friendship, Maine. My mother’s family has been summering there for six generations,” she recalls. “When I graduated college and they asked for my hometown, I wrote Friend- ship, because that felt the most like home to me.” After college she moved to San Francisco, but after a few years there, she was ready to try living in Maine year-round.

Upon relocating, she discovered that there were some aspects of living in a bigger city that she missed. “Portland is such a great town, but in those days, it had no good home fabric store. I knew that I wasn’t alone in missing that, because in these other stores where I worked, people were saying, ‘I need home decor fabric,’ which is 54 inches wide. I knew I wasn’t the only one driving to Boston for it. So I wrote up a business plan,” she says. “But it was 2009! I don’t know if you remember 2009, but it wasn’t necessarily an auspicious time to start something new. I had lost my job doing something else because the company collapsed in the wake of the financial crisis, though, so there was nowhere to go but up.”

One silver lining of the economic downturn: there was plenty of property available. “And they weren’t asking too much for it,” recalls Ambrose. “I found this space. The landlord is J. B. Brown, and they own the best buildings in the city, if you ask me. I was the first retailer in 40 years in the building. I like to consider myself kind of the anchor of the neighborhood.” She and her fellow tenants have even given their area a name. “We’ve named the neighborhood Bridgeside. Isn’t it good? I’d really like that to catch on,” she says with a laugh.

Her place in Bridgeside wasn’t always as large as it is today. “For the first nine years, we were just on this side,” she says, gesturing at the showroom. “All the workrooms and sewing areas that you see over on the other side of the wall were here. In the fall of 2019, we doubled the space, just in time for everything to slow down with lock- down. But once we got back up, I thought, ‘Okay, now we have got to make this space our own,’ and business picked up quickly.”

The expanded retail area (now 8,000 square feet) has room for multiple vignettes, a lavish display of Dash and Albert rug samples, and plenty of unusual vintage finds. On the other side of the whitewashed brick wall lies the workroom, where a cornucopia of fabrics is on display. “I’ve got great relationships with the mills that make all this designer fabric. They can offer it to me at a good price point because of how much I’ve bought now over the years. I’m committed to the fabrics that I know I’m going to sell here in Maine,” explains Ambrose as she walks through the atelier. At the back of the enormous room, stitchers are working quietly,” “with great focus, on custom reupholstery projects, transforming dated Victorian love seats or 1980s armchairs into fresh and exciting furnishings.

It’s the combination of the steady whirring of the industrial sewing machines, the gentle murmur of indie music, and the friendly staff chatting with retail customers that truly sets the mood at Home Remedies. “We do custom stuff, but it’s also a retail store, so really anybody can come in,” says Ambrose. “We’re friendly, we’re regular folk, and we like helping you. Because if you like it here in the store, then you’re probably one of us.”

The Ideal Remedy

 While the folks in the atelier at Home Remedies work their magic on custom projects, a wide variety of offerings also awaits walk-in customers in the retail areas of the space. “We’ve already funneled it down to the stuff that we think you’re going to like,” says Ambrose. Here are some selections from our recent visit. 

• It’s a given that a home store will have a good selection of glossy interior design books, and Home Remedies has plenty of them, as well as an excellent collection of cookbooks. They also keep a selection of Maine-related fiction front and center to entice out-of-towners to pick up a novel they might not have otherwise encountered.
• The display beds are especially lush with textures and layers—think Indian block-print throw pillows with rustic linen bedspreads over silky Coyuchi sheet sets. A wall of open shelves holds many more soft bedroom furnishings.
• While you wander around the showroom, keep an eye open for the ever-changing selection of quirky vintage pieces that Ambrose and her staff curate. I was captivated by a set of blue and gold Japanese lusterware myself, but there is bound to be something (vintage brass candlesticks, majolica wall vases, antique matchboxes) for everyone.
• All down the wall of the workroom, Ambrose and her staff have hung a series of textile samples in groups of three. She explains that it helps clients envision color groupings for custom upholstery, but it’s inspirational for anyone who loves color or pattern or texture—or all three! Browse with both your eyes and your hands for the full experience.