Haughton House sets up new location, shares fellowship in scrapbooking
Not every story about a burgeoning business includes a love story but not every business tandem is Arnie and Faith Young.
When these two widowers met and fell in love, they got married and started working on blending their two lives together. Not only did each of them have children to bring into their new marriage, they also each brought a house into the union.
Since Faith had children who were still in school, her house in Bossier became their residence so her children could stay in the same schools while Arnie’s house in Haughton got marked to sale. But Arnie was not the only one who didn’t quite want to let go of his quaint little house; Faith was becoming very attached to the charming house in Haughton.
But it wasn’t until a friend made a suggestion to turn the house into a retreat for scrapbookers that the Haughton House was born in the fall of 2010.
Scrapbooking had been a great hobby for Faith since 1999 so the suggestion definitely excited her. Faith, herself, had spent many years with the creative hobby and had participated in numerous retreats, where fellow scrapbookers descend on a space for the weekend and crank out as many pages as possible while spending time with new and old friends.
As Arnie saw women coming in with bags full of new scrapbooking supplies from various stores, the Youngs knew they needed to add retail to their business. By April 2, 2011, the Youngs were selling scrapbooking supplies onsite and “people started coming,” Faith said. The store was open just on Saturdays and the house was still open for retreats. Retreats that were creating great friendships all in the welcoming home environment an older home can easily provide.
“Scrapbooking is about fellowship,” Haughton House customer Cindy Baker said. And it is a place to meet lots of new people that become your good friends, including the owners, according to many.
Denise Bourgeois, an avid scrapbooker of 16 years, found Haughton House around the same time they opened.
“I fell in love with the whole place, the store and retreat house,” Bourgeois said. “Faith and Arnie are open-hearted people you love instantly.”
While having scrapbooked for many years prior to her time in the Bossier area, Bourgeois found a great group of friends through the Haughton House. She is a part of the Scrap Pack, a group of eight women who were retreating at Haughton House in January. They started out as small groups of women, some from Texas and Oklahoma, who knew one another and turned into a large group that comes together multiple times per year. They even make matching T-shirts for retreat weekends.
“These are great weekends when you get a lot done,” Bourgeois said.
Depending on the length of the retreat and the amount of preplanning put into it, the scrapbookers can complete anywhere from 15 to 30 to 60 and even up to 72 pages in one weekend. “It’s definitely in the preparation,” the Scrap Pack ladies agreed.
Retreating is very popular across the country, Bourgeois said, and many times the retreats are attached to hotels. But, at Haughton House, the ladies would stay in rooms in the homey little house in the quaint town.
Soon, Haughton House was booking up, and there were not enough weekends for all of the requests for retreats and classes. It didn’t take long for the Youngs, former employees of the medical field, to see the need to expand their new business once again. This time, the Youngs knew expanding the business meant moving out of the beloved Haughton House. Their most unique need was to find something zoned for business for 24 hours, so they could host overnight retreats.
Faith said they faced many struggles and ups and downs throughout the process of looking for a new location. When in the shopping center on Benton Road one day, the Adrenaline 24/7 Fitness caught Faith’s attention. The shopping center had to be zoned for 24 hours with a gym that never closed and the Youngs had hit the jackpot.
“Everything just started working out that shouldn’t be working out, doors started opening,” Faith said. Within a few months, the Youngs had a new, larger and more visible location at 5000 Benton Road, Suite 12.
The new HH Scrapbooking Store’s grand Customers will see in the retreat space that great opening was in November. detail was taken to make the common room “Every week has been busier and busier feel like just one big living room with carpet, and busier,” Faith said. She estimates about 70 curtains and a cubby with a little piece of their percent of their new customers have found humble beginnings and something familiar — them just by driving by on Benton Road while the fireplace from the Haughton House, which the other 30 percent have come through word Arnie had put in himself years ago. of mouth. The store space, is about triple the “This is my happy place,” Baker said, and she size of the Haughton House store with an is not alone in that sentiment. “This is our social inventory of about one and a half times what life,” Cristina Marley said, all while working on their old store and storage held previously and Couture scrapbooking pages during a Saturday there is more retreat space now, too. With the class at the Bossier location. more industrial feel of the store came the added –Jessica Hemingway undertaking of trying to make the space feel more like the inviting home they had outgrown.
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