Red Raven combines home, fashion

Published 3:00 pm Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Cheryl Sherman, right, owner of The Red Raven in Dowagiac, is pictured with her daughter, Jessica Sherman. Off the Water photo/KATIE ROHMAN

The Red Raven is, according to owner Cheryl Sherman, “a place where home and fashion come together.”

The store opened in Dowagiac in 2010, but has been in several other locations, including Alabama and New York.

The store’s purpose, Sherman said, is not only to sell clothes but also to re-purpose or “up-cycle” furniture. She said she and her husband, Chuck, will “take something that someone else would throw away and repaint it or rebuild it.”

Among these re-purposed items are a chair made out of doors and their parts, an old table that has been restored and repainted, and a pantry that has been transformed into a bookshelf. Several other items are available in The Red Raven, including a vast array of clothes, an old typewriter, antique chests and an old record player.

This is not all that The Red Raven has to offer, however. The building that houses the store was originally built in the 1900s as the Century Theater, which means there is extra space beyond the ground floor. Some of this space is utilized by Sherman’s 16-year-old daughter, Gabby, who offers dance lessons in a studio that can be found by traveling to the back of the store and heading upstairs. Sherman’s other daughter, Jessica, 24, is a photographer, and has a shop downstairs where she develops her photographs. But Sherman uses some of the space for herself, mainly for storage purposes, and said she hopes to open up some of the extra space for rent sometime in the summer.

Sherman said she wanted the store to be unique. She said she chose the store’s name specifically for the purpose of sparking curiosity in passersby and getting people to come in to see what the store has to offer.

The Red Raven can be found at 201 Front St. in Dowagiac, Mich., and can be contacted at (269) 462-9144 or visit it on Facebook.