Shop the Cricket Window for Local Treasures

IN THE SPAN OF ONE WEEKDAY HOUR, three clumps of shoppers see past the understated entrance of Ginny Roemer and Rachel Hensen’s shop and crowd into its four small rooms, each packed with pillows, ceramics, quilts, jewelry, candles, and more. Every browser finds something to buy and burbles with delight on the way out.

Set in an easily missed Los Alamos strip mall, the Cricket Window has defied the pandemic odds by not only surviving but thriving.

Hensen and her mother, Roemer, cut their retail teeth by scouting and selling antiques online before opening a shop and, most recently, managing estate sales in a town filled with midcentury-modern chic. Some of the vintage finds are mixed in with the shop’s imported goods and handmade treasures by Southwestern makers.

“It’s just interesting and unique things,” Hensen says. “Small-batch, artisanal, natural materials, lots of local makers. And it’s eco-minded that we find new homes for vintage items.”

She contributes her own pottery to the mix, including holders for air plants, delivers African mud cloth to a Santa Fe Opera seamstress for pillows, and repurposes estate-sale finds into store displays.

As for the shop name? Hensen grew up in Los Alamos, but service in the Navy took her to Virginia, where she became enchanted by a Victorian house with a crooked window. Her young children, though, misunderstood her and called it “the cricket window.” She made something out of that, too.