March 23, 2006 Issue                                               

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Rugmaven owner/therapist prescribes a close-out sale
by LEA SITTON STANLEY

Hill resident Mary Harris has closed her carpet shop in Chestnut Hill, Rugmaven, after four years, but she is selling her inventory at dramatically reduced prices in a liquidation center at 8528 Germantown Ave. (Photo by Jimmy J. Pack Jr.)

There was something about Mary, at least this one.

Mary Harris, reared a ‘Yunker and educated at a girls’ Catholic high school, traveled to Egypt at age 19, took a ride on a camel and fell in love with Oriental rugs.

“That trip was when I first toured the weavers’ workshops and bought my first rug,” Harris said Friday. “I couldn’t stop buying them. I just love them so much.”

By her mid-30s, Mary had run out of space for her purchases. So she opened a shop, Rugmaven, on Main Street in Manayunk. A second Rugmaven opened in Chestnut Hill after that. Harris also maintained her practice as a psychotherapist.

Now, after four years in retail, she’s folding up her tent. “This was never meant to be forever,” said Harris, who shut her stores a couple of weeks ago and set up a liquidation center at 8528 Germantown Ave., the former space of the Yankee Candle Shop.

But Harris is not going out of business in the usual blow-out kind of way. Instead, she’s scheduled a silent auction to move her remaining 500-plus rugs. Starting Friday at 10 a.m., bidders may register at Rugmaven’s front desk, marked by a small photograph of the teenage Harris on a camel. Then, they may come and go as often as they like until 6 p.m. Sunday, when the bidding will close. On that last day, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Harris will serve food and drink, and hand out vouchers for a free cup of coffee at the Chestnut Hill Coffee Co. up the street, just to keep the crowds down in the store.

“It’s really my going-away party,” said Harris, 39 and a Chestnut Hill resident. “So many of my customers have become my friends. They’ll have me over for dinner to see the rug they bought in its space at their home.”

She plans to funnel some profits of the auction to Afghani women weavers, believing that supporting the women in underdeveloped countries is the way to boost those societies as a whole.

Starting bids will be as low as $25 for a 2-by-3-foot rug. Harris said she would not set a reserve, a minimum amount needed to win an item; the highest bid will take the rug. She pointed to an 8-by-10 Pakistani Peshawar, made of handspun wool and vegetable die, as an example of what bidders will find. Now priced at 60 percent off in the liquidation center, or $2,400, the opening bid will be $960.

“It’ll be very bittersweet,” Harris said of the end to her retail business. She loves the rugs, but had found it hard to run the shops after losing her manager, Stephanie Zielinski, to the Peace Corps.

Harris expects that designers and customers will still call on her to find particular Orientals for them. But the bulk of her energy will go into her psychotherapy practice (her specialty is gerontology) and her job as an adjunct professor at La Salle University.

Yet, the woman whose family considers her “eccentric” still marvels at her love affair with rugs.

“From doing this, I really do have some small belief in the past-life thing,” Harris said as she sat crosslegged on a Persian Mashad in her temporary storefront. “That [love of rugs] had to come from somewhere because it certainly didn’t come from Manayunk.”