You can’t miss it — the little lavender building adorned with twinkly white lights: Take Heart boutique in Blowing Rock looks a bit like somebody’s garden cottage. Except it’s on Main Street. “It kind of stands out,” owner Sheri Furman admits, laughing. But Furman had a good feeling about opening the boutique, and that sort of hunch is how she assembles stock, too. Each year, she asks a question that every new item has to answer. Say, “Is it comforting?” (The fuzzy sweaters, candles, and shea butter soap sure are.) Or, “Is it lovely?” (The heart-patterned stationery and that wooden sign paraphrasing Walt Whitman: “We were together. I forget the rest”? Certainly.) Couple this cozy curation with Furman’s bright and kindly spirit, and you can see why local customers are regulars at the shop and why tourists devotedly return — no matter how much time has gone by. “Blowing Rock is where people vacation,” Furman says. “You see people you haven’t seen in a year. So on a good day, it feels like a homecoming.”
Take Heart Boutique
1009 Main Street
Blowing Rock, NC 28605
(828) 295-3444
To commemorate our 90th anniversary, we’ve compiled a time line that highlights the stories, contributors, and themes that have shaped this magazine — and your view of the Old North State — using nine decades of our own words.
From its northernmost point in Corolla to its southern terminus on Cedar Island, this scenic byway — bound between sound and sea — links the islands and communities of the Outer Banks.
Us? An icon? Well, after 90 years and more than 2,000 issues celebrating North Carolina from mountains to coast, we hope you’ll agree that we’ve earned the title.
After nearly a century — or just a couple of years — these seafood restaurants have become coastal icons, the places we know, love, and return to again and again.
