Welcome Home
A Chic Boutique that Feels Like a Hug
Demeter Home in Pine Plains is everything a home should be: warm, embracing, cozy—and extremely stylish. The icing on the cake is the family style-greeting that you get as you walk in the door, from owner Alex Athanasiadis.
Certainly it takes skill to stock a shop with fabrics, furnishings, accessories, and pillows that discerning customers will want to buy. But it takes someone with serious retail experience to understand what it takes to put clients at ease in a shop—and put them in the mood to shop.
Athanasiadis started his retail career while in his early 20s, at the Giorgio Armani boutique in Tyson’s Corner, outside Washington, D.C.
The company was so impressed with his work that they transferred him to New York City. A few years later, he moved to Yves St. Laurent on 57th St.
Then COVID hit. He and his partner grew bored with quarantine in the city, and began making journeys to Dutchess County so they could dine out at restaurants again. In the process, they fell in love with Pine Plains. Athanasiadis found a retail space he could lease on East Church Street, and decided to switch from fashion to home design, because …why not? He is a man at ease with change.
So far it’s working out great, thanks in part to his natural gift for making friends. One of his most important early connections was Leslie Flood, owner of the eponymous upholstery and design shop in Millerton. Athanasiadis credits her with teaching him about fabric and how it works on upholstered furniture (as opposed to human bodies).
The high quality of the products at Demeter Home is the baseline. On top of that, Athanasiadis offers something that not all small-town shop owners understand they need: friendliness.
“When I first came up here, I would walk into a store and see that people were not being acknowledged,” he says. “At my store, people come in, we talk, we sit. I give them an experience.
“People shop because they’re stressed out, it really is retail therapy. The experience of shopping needs to be relaxing.”
He has new and repeat customers from as far away as Virginia. Sometimes they just come to chat. Of course, most people also buy something. It’s easy to do, with small and large items that range in price from $5 gift cards and small hostess gifts to toys and snacks for dogs to $6,000 sleeper sofas.
Some products are local, such as artworks by Sarah Blodgett, and handknit wool beanie caps that have proven to be extremely popular. There are fluffy cardigan sweaters for $40. There is a large ceramic vase with butterfly wings designed by the model Claudia Schiffer.
One thing you won’t see at Demeter Home is multiples.
“Once something is sold, I won’t carry that item anymore,” Athanasiadis says. “I don’t like my customers to see something they bought when they go to a friend’s house.”
By Cynthia Hochswender
Photographs by Jiatong Lu