ELORA – “You shouldn’t buy it Marty, it’s too far up the hill.”
This is what Marty Van Vliet was told decades ago before he bought 105 Metcalfe St. in downtown Elora, officially taking ownership on Dec. 1, 1994 alongside his partner Mark Anderson, turning it into the Mermaid in Elora.
The risk appears to have paid off as the store soon celebrates 30 years of business selling things Van Vliet said you can’t really find anywhere else and becoming an iconic photo destination and an early part of Elora’s resurgence as a tourist destination.
In an interview at the store, Van Vliet credited changing and evolving the store with its longevity. Downtown Elora has changed a lot over that time too and the area now is a far cry from what it was when he first bought the place.
“There were, I think, around 18 or 19 stores that were empty,” Van Vliet said of downtown Elora. “One the roof had collapsed and there was a tree growing out of it. It was pretty bad.”
Tourists, he was told, also didn’t go up Metcalfe Street and tended to stay on Mill Street.
He decided he needed to make the store a visual destination people had to go see by painting the outside, planting flowers and adding seven doors on the side which has now become an iconic photo op for tourists.
“I have a door knocker room, so I wanted to advertise my doors and also being an antique dealer I was seeing lots of great old doors laying around that were not being used. So it sort of brought the two together,” Van Vliet said on how the doors came to be.
Before the Mermaid in Elora, Van Vliet was in art consignment and had a small shop down the street in a shed but early on the store focused on antiques until the mid 2000s.
“Those were pretty wild times, we would run the store all day and then evenings we would be out doing auctions or I’d be at people’s homes buying stuff,” he said. “I didn’t have my first holiday until 1998.”
When someone offered him a free dining set from the 1930s, Van Vliet said he figured it was time to switch gears, first starting with new lines of jewelry and then expanding into door knockers, hardware and general gifts which tripled business.
“I started to go to trade shows around the world,” Van Vliet said, adding he got his importer’s license. “You’re not walking in my store and seeing what you see in every other store … you’re finding different things that I’ve found around the world.”
Elora saw a resurgence over this time period which Van Vliet said started with the redevelopment of Metcalfe Street and then the gas station turning into the Elora Green Space.
“It made the town feel different, it was more beautiful and more a package to come to for the day,” Van Vliet said. Then the internet let people hear about Elora on a more personal level and about how close it was to major population centres which sealed the deal in Van Vliet’s view.
Van Vliet is not originally from the area, growing up all over the place due to his father’s military career, but had friends he knew from going to the University of Waterloo who lived here.
He said he was drawn by the Elora community who accepted and treated him and Anderson well as gay men.
“In the 1990s there wasn’t a lot of small towns that I would have felt comfortable living in,” Van Vliet said. “Elora was a weird little oasis of very liberal thought people. Generally, the store owners were mostly hippies from the 1970s, artists and artisans who’d moved here and they were very liberal and open minded … It was a nice place for us to live and grow.”
The pair have also gone on to own and operate the Elora Distilling Company not far from their little store on Metcalfe and also credit manager Colleen James with taking the reins at the Mermaid in Elora as part of their ongoing success.
The store will be holding an anniversary party on Dec. 2 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. to celebrate the milestone with in-store discounts and refreshments.
