Weller is our home

Weller is our brick and mortar store located at 88 Church Street in downtown Burlington, Vermont. Our beautiful historic building with its lofty tin ceilings and stained wood floor date back to the late 19th Century.

We wanted to share our fascination with our beautiful building’s history – following is an excerpt from the US Dept of the Interior’s National Register of Historic Places, Church Street Historic District, Burlington Vermont. PDF of original document here…

86-88 CHURCH STREET (WELLER BLOCK) 1889


Designed by architect Clellan Waldo Fisher (1862-1932), the son of noted architect Alfred Benjamin Fisher (1831-1911), this four-story, three bay, brick commercial block was built for Mrs. M.H. Weller. A tall, narrow building with both Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival elements, its most distinguishing features are perhaps the elaborate brickwork and a rounded bow window extending neary the entire width of the second story. Each end is marked with a brick pilaster rising the full height of the structure. A flat cornice is capped by copper flashing. The heavy entablature has an intricate brick pattern, employing checkerboard and denticulated motifs. A similar checkerboard brick pattern is used between the third and fourth stories. Third story windows are one over one double hung sash with full arch transoms above. The transoms are divided from the lights below by a string course that runs the width of the building. Oversize rounded arched lintels consist of five header rows of bricks. The second floor windows have one over one double-hung sash and rectangular transoms. Again, a string course runs the width of the building between the sash and the transom. Here the lintels are tall flat arches made up of seven rows of brick… this high relief brickwork and exaggerated lintels lend a Richardsonian Romanesque feeling to the building’s upper stories. The second floor window is a wide four-light wood bowed oriel. Each window within it has a fixed sash and a large transom. Two wide wood bands extend above the windows: the top band is incised with horizontal grooves while the lower one is flat. Carved into the wood medallion on the north side of the lower band is the name “Weller,” with the letters set on the diagonal, and on the south the date “1894″ indicating that the oriel may have been added to the facade five years after the block was built. Below the oriel, a wooden sign board is cut to follow the contours of the bow.


The distrinctive storefront has narrow floor to ceiling windows, and three entries: a door on the south end providing access to the basement shop, a door on the north leading to the upper floors, and a central door flanked by the shop windows opening into the ground floor retail space. Above the ground floor windows and doors is a decorative band of low relief geometric forms carved into three panels, with each panel separated by blocks of raised diamonds. Above this panel and below the wood signboard is a band of opaque glass transom lights spanning the width of the façade. Despite its height, the frequent use of string courses and variation in fenestration give this handsome building a strong horizontal organization and order.


This building, with its combination of Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne detailing, fits its site well, between the Italianate and Queen Anne style buildings to either side of it. Like the adjacent Warner Block and the Isham Block, the Weller Block was an architect-designed brick building constructed to replace an early to mid-nineteenth century wood frame commercial block. This shift was indicative of the improving financial circumstances among Burlington merchants and businessmen, an increasing concern about fire hazards, and a desire to improve the Church Street commercial district that characterized the late decades of the nineteenth century. As an intact product of one of Burlington’s most noted architects, it is important for its design and for its transitional style.


Mrs. M.H. Weller purchased the property in 1871, and later commissioned the twenty-seven year old Fisher to design the building. Mrs .Weller passed the property on to her daughter, Mrs. Mary Weller Parkhill, who owned several other Church Street area properties, including the Parkhill building on Main Street. One of the building’s first tenants was Saule & Co. shoe shop in 1890… and Bailey’s Music Shop from 1943 until the 1990s.