Our Story

Rust outside. Sunlight in.

We took a corrugated shed at the end of a working boatyard and cut the light back into it.

The weathered white hull lettered 5th Ave. Marina resting on wooden stands outside the boatyard sheds

The building had been a boat shop, then a net loft, then storage for things nobody wanted to throw away. When we found it there were four inches of dust on the sills and a hull hanging from a chain over the door.

What it had — the only thing it really had — was windows. Twenty feet of steel-framed factory glass on the water side, facing east. On the first morning we stood in it, the sun came through and hit the far wall and the whole room turned the color of a peach.

We decided right there that everything we did would be in service of that light. White plaster. Bleached oak. Linen instead of blinds. Plants where they'd throw a shadow. Nothing dark, nothing heavy, nothing that had to shout.

Strength lives beside gentleness. Nothing here is decorative for decoration's sake.

The rule we wrote on the wall

If there were a reception desk, it would probably smell like old boat timber. There isn’t one. Look up instead—the history is still written into the beams. The mugs came off a neighbor's wheel three blocks away. The art on the walls belongs to whoever is showing this month, and it is for sale, and we don't take a cut.

Outside the door it's still a shipyard: rust, steel, weather, tide charts, dogs asleep under hulls, a sign that has said DOCK CLOSED since before anyone can remember. We love that. The contrast is the whole brand.

People walk in expecting a barber shop. What they usually say, standing in the middle of the floor, is some version of the same sentence: I wish this existed in my neighborhood.

It can. That's the point. Start with the light.

Tell us your story. We've got time.

The long dining table and sofas under the whitewashed trusses of the Harbor
The table came out of a forty-two foot hull. The fastener holes are still in it.
A bright plaster wall with a single framed photograph above a many-coloured painted apothecary chest
New walls on the first Saturday of every month. Always someone from within a mile.
A wide panorama of the Scuttlebutt Studios room: rugs, armchairs, piano and long table beneath whitewashed timber trusses

Come see the light for yourself.

Book with NatashaReserve The Harbor