Claire Murray moving to new island location

COURTESY PHOTO CLAIRE MURRAY Claire Murray For over two decades, customers of Claire Murray's original hooked rugs have walked through a little white gate, past a small courtyard where friendly but homeless cats often take safe shelter, to the door of her shop on South Water Street.

After 23 years in this location, Murray is closing by the end of the first week of January and plans to reopen at a new, but as of yet undetermined address, by April or May 2010. Her story is not unlike that of several other store-owners who have changed locations within the last five years, all trying to maintain a downtown presence while keeping overhead expenses at a reasonable level so their businesses remain viable.

"I am closing the store, but I don't believe it is the end of Claire Murray on Nantucket," she said. "In fact, we are actively looking for a suitable location, and at this time we have narrowed it down to three places. Thankfully, my present landlord, Nantucket Island Resorts, is giving us an extra week in January to have a little time to vacate the premises.

"While it saddens us that we have had to make this decision to change locations, I have to wear my business hat. The overhead has escalated to the point that, as a business woman, it no longer makes sense to keep the store there."

Murray, who now names 15 signature stores along the Eastern seaboard and 20 other shops licensed to sell her goods, has come a long way from her start as a student fond of textiles. She majored in art in college, then studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in New York City with a specialty in printmaking and sculpture. When she moved from the West coast to Nantucket in 1979 as a young single mother raising a daughter, she did not know anyone here.

"I bought a house on Fair Street and named it Fair Gardens and opened it as an inn," Murray recalled. "I had some old garages torn down that gave me added rooms for the inn and a seminar room for women to stay for a few days to become immersed in courses I offered in rug hooking, quilting and stenciling and workshops in culinary uses for herbs, making dried herb wreaths, potpourris and sachets. That was the precursor to what I have now."

The other part of Murray's past is that the South Water Street building she has been in for so long was once Walter Beinecke's wife's business, Nantucket Needleworks, originally the Nantucket Cloth Company that divided to become Nantucket Needleworks and Nantucket Looms. Murray purchased the Needleworks, the source of all her first yarns, and had Beinecke as her landlord until he sold his downtown holdings to Winthrop and they, in turn, to Nantucket Island Resorts.

"It is a very historic part of the island, and I am thankful I've been able to keep it alive all these years," said Murray.

All of Murray's hooked area rugs are designed by her, an ability she credits to lessons from the late artist Sybil Goldsmith and artist Maggie Meredith who taught her when she first moved to the island. Her first rugs were made for the Fair Street inn. Later, she started selling rug kits in her store and went on to produce finished rugs for purchase.

"I was just putting my artwork on the floor and it took off," said Murray. "I ended up selling my inn and leaving the island because I knew I'd need a year-round labor force that didn't exist here. I ended up buying a late 1700s dairy farm and made all the old buildings into my warehouses. That was where I grew my company."

Murray loves Nantucket and the ways its beauty inspires her designs. She has every intent to continue doing business here, and never lets up on schemes for new patterns.

"I'm always designing rugs on the backs of napkins and scraps of paper." I