Pottery and more

By Sam Harvey
Staff Reporter

	Coastal Point • RUSLANA LAMBERT A tropical feel, combined with a coffee shop, gives the Pottery Place a unique and comfortable feel.

But Pottery Place in Fenwick Island offers a lot more than what’s out in the yard, and there’s no better location to step out of the weather — into a sort of tropical oasis.

You can almost hear macaws screeching, monkeys hooting in the distance, as you brush through towering silk trees, past decorative African masks and Malaysian accent furniture.

And then you see a clearing ahead — and is that – yes, it’s a coffee shop. We’re saved.

Flynn said her younger brother, Van Du Zee, had come up with the idea for the Perks Café. And while she said he’d “moved on to bigger and better things” in Florida, Fenwick’s caffeine-deprived thank him for his initiative.

“It’s become a great little secret spot,” Flynn noted. “Local crowd, everybody knows everybody.”

She stocks the case from Bagels n’ Buns (Ocean City, Md.) and plans to add some natural, antioxidant smoothies as well. She also reported the imminent arrival of wireless Internet.

In other entertainment news, Flynn advised everyone to call ahead for a seat at the “Fiesta Fun in Fenwick” event, scheduled for the end of March. Comcast will be filming a bit with local restaurateur Matt Haley (NorthEast Seafood Kitchen, Bluecoast, FishOn!), who’s lately returned from Mexico with a few experiences to share.

“We’re all going to wear sombreros,” Flynn stated, enthusiastically. (Whether she’ll be able to convince her husband, Jeff Laros, to wear one remains to be seen. He just grinned and shook his head.)

But she expressed no less enthusiasm over her merchandise, offering effervescent commentary as she moved from point to point in the store.

“You can almost take something like this and work around it with your larger pieces,” she said, pointing to a little accent piece — a sort of a curio cabinet. Elsewhere, she expressed special pride over some mirrors framed in dark, polished wood and a selection of wall fountains. “You have your sofa, we have everything else,” Flynn stated.

There’s more than 1,000 feet in housewares at the Pottery Place — cookbooks and a new stainless section — “anything you can possibly imagine,” Flynn advised.

And whether it’s domestic or shipped from overseas, she said she has always tried to offer her customers a reasonable price.

She admitted she there are plenty of great stores in the area, and she even shops at some of them herself, on occasion. But picking up more than one or two pieces of décor at a designer store usually taps the pocketbook pretty quick, she pointed out.

“Mom created this business more than 30 years ago, and she always wanted to give people the best price possible,” Flynn stated. Pottery Place is geared toward accepting whole “containers” (truckloads) of merchandise, which lets her pass along her savings on freight.

It’s a bit of a gamble — there’s always the possibility that she might buy a container-full of décor that doesn’t sell. But Flynn knows the business — she’s had a hand in it since she was just a tyke. “I’m almost bred for this,” she laughed.

Her mother, Sandy Flynn, opened the original Pottery Place in the early 1970s, on Dorchester Street in downtown Ocean City. They were up to five locations, at one point.

Flynn remembered when her mother opened the shop in Fenwick Island, back in 1976. She said she used to take the bus to 142nd Street, and walk all the way across town to get to the shop. “It was like working in Siberia,” she recalled. “I mean, there was nothing going on.”

But she said her mother’s business grew, year by year. And things really took off after the state installed a traffic light on the corner of Route 1 and West James Street. “She just started busting out walls,” Flynn recalled, and before long the Pottery Place encompassed three shop spaces (and the side yard) at the Sunshine Plaza.

She said she felt her mother would have wanted someone in the family to keep things going. “Her passion and hard work provided my brother and me with a great lifestyle,” Flynn remembered. “So I figured, what better way to be here? And she’d want it no other way.”

Flynn casts a little shine of familial pride over the whole place, but there’s no way to fully describe a shop like Pottery Place. It requires first-hand exploration.

Winter hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information on the shop or “Fiesta Fun in Fenwick,” call (302) 539-3603.