Border Bargains
Turn your house into a hacienda with Talavera tile and terra-cotta pots, hand-blown glassware and hand-carved furniture: a guide to thirty shops just across the Rio Grande where the quality is high and the prices aren't.
(Page 2 of 4)
Curiosidades Nelly, Avenida Guerrero 2328 and 2610, 87-15-01-68; American Express only. Eliseo Navarrette Chimal has been selling pottery from this open-air shop for 23 years. His business card lists his wares as “Clay Pottery, Talavera, Mexican Culture”—which translates into a wildly eclectic assortment of stuff. Classic terra-cotta pots are stocked in hundreds of shapes and sizes, from nearly immovable behemoths to clay thimbles fit for a dollhouse. (To protect these less-than-durable clay pots from the elements, slather on a coat of Saltillo-tile sealer.) You can load up on those ubiquitous goat pots (whose heads always seem to snap off after the first year outdoors) or a wide-mouthed fish or an armadillo lounging on his back waiting for a nice geranium to be planted in his stomach. Among the mind-boggling options: 25-gallon terra-cotta pots ($25); enormous white clay pots with firing burns ($75); odd, four-mouth water vessels with handles, perfect for strawberry plants ($20); eight-foot cantera columns ($200); and small carved-cantera fountains ($180). (Cantera is a soft volcanic stone that comes in cream, gray, and rose.) Stone guard lions? A plaster bust of a Native American with a wolfskin headdress? A hundred pineapple decanters glazed green and yellow? Get ’em all at Nelly.
Three blocks farther down Guerrero, the second Curiosidades Nelly is tucked behind an unassuming and easily overlooked storefront (I found it only because I was walking and looking determinedly for it). Here you’ll find an extensive variety of Talavera pottery: Navarrette stocks the more refined dinnerware from Puebla ($740 for eight place settings plus an assortment of platters, pitchers, and serving bowls, 72 pieces in all, which can also be purchased separately) and the vibrant pieces from Dolores Hidalgo, which come in both lead-free glazes ($7 for a dinner plate) and traditional glazes ($6). Serious Talavera addicts can feed their habit with additional necessities that carpet the second floor: small picture frames ($6), triple-tier fountains ($150), tissue holders ($8), soap dishes ($6), and urns ($12). You can even give that special someone the sun and the moon for a mere $40.
If you don’t want to store your new pottery on the floor at home, you can pick up a six-foot-long carved-pine buffet ($800) or hutch ($350 to $600). Other unfinished pine furniture includes headboards (twin size with a carved spray of calla lilies, $180; double with a carved peacock in repose, each feather rendered in stylized detail, $250) and benches (carved with the typical designs of swans or sunflowers or dueling horses’ heads, $200). For something a little different, consider a bench with frolicking fish and turtles painted on the back and sides for the same price, or a two- by three-foot carved and colorfully painted retablo with an arched top and saintly figures in little niches ($200). Check out the five-panel pine screen decorated with carved and painted saints, poppies, a sun, and a couple of shifty-eyed deer ($180). And whatever you do, don’t let the overwhelming inventory in this store distract you from the five-foot statue of San Pascual that guards the sales counter by the front door. Carved from a single piece of mesquite, he looks unnervingly like Richard M. Nixon ($400).
Guadalajara Pottery, Avenida Guerrero 2908, at Chihuahua, 87-14-47-61; personal checks accepted. Your American Express card is welcome here, and it’s a good thing—especially if you covet the nearly life-size wooden crucifix ($3,592) or the replicas of Mayan relics (from $325) or an enormous cantera clamshell fountain topped with a languid mermaid ($2,500). After 25 years in business, this indoor-outdoor rabbit warren has miles of pots ($4 to $150), Talavera ware ($5 to $100), and terra-cotta suns ($10 for el sol grande) stacked in room after room. The prices marked on some of the merchandise are merely a jumping-off point for bargaining. Owner José Navarrete offered me “wholesale” status without my even asking, which brought the inflated prices more in line with those at other border establishments. The bizarre curiosities upstairs—paintings, carvings, masks, and religious icons—will appeal to the shopper looking for that one-of-a-kind treasure.
Rafael, Avenida Guerrero at Sonora, just before the circle, next to the Hospital San José (on the left heading south; no sign and no phone, although messages can be left for Rafael at 87-14-25-88—which is, confusingly, the number for Rafael Disco); personal checks accepted, no credit cards.
Shoppers can profit from what owner Rafael Costilla calls his “sickness”—an obsession to possess every paper rose, every Talavera platter, every punched-tin luminaria that strikes his fancy, whether or not he can afford it or find the space in his shop to hang it. And since he has no business card, no telephone, and no sign announcing his shop, you have to wonder if he even wants to sell it. Costilla says he sells to many merchants from north of the border (a testament to his reasonable prices), and indeed, while we were browsing in the store, the owner of a gift shop in Boerne was picking up merchandise to resell and an interior designer from San Antonio was down on his weekly visit to collect iron tables and chairs for his clients. After 33 years of compulsively stocking his store, Costilla offers a selection of merchandise that can’t be beat. If you can navigate the mountains of lanterns, boxes of hand-blown glasses, piles of carved masks and folk art animals, and stacks of metal furniture in this labyrinth of rooms, stairways, shady courtyards, and halls, you will find double doors of weathered mesquite ($250); an equipal love seat, sofa, and large chair of leather, bent saplings, and cedar slats ($660); comfortable iron-and-woven-cane chairs ($90); metal chairs that cry for a cushion ($60); iron table bases ($135); a small unfinished desk with a rustic, carved front ($235); an unfinished double-bed headboard carved with stylized fish ($380); a five-foot by three-foot mirror with a punched-tin frame ($360); punched-tin lamp shades ($18); hand-forged-metal drawer pulls ($3); twenty-inch Talavera platters decorated with calla lilies ($60); Talavera dinner plates with a busy blue, yellow, green, and red design ($10); and so on. Thank goodness we didn’t have a larger truck or my husband and I would now be the proud owners of a wooden cart, probably half a century old, that was used for hauling cane in the interior of Mexico. All that character for only $450.
El Cid, Avenida Guerrero 3861; no phone. “Dear Customer, If you break it, you pay it,” warns a sign in this small glassware store. Behave yourself, however, and you can buy unbroken tumblers, candle holders, vases, bowls, plates, and margarita glasses in thick, clear hand-blown glass with blue or green rims for $2 to $10.
Luis Medina Custom Furniture, Calle Anahuac 3351 (Anahuac crosses Guerrero just north of El Rio Motor Hotel), 87-15-07-81; personal checks accepted, no credit cards. You won’t find any of the pieces made here in a store: Medina employs twelve workers, who concentrate solely on custom furniture. When we visited his woodworking shop, library cabinets destined for “Señor Longoria’s” home were being made. Although the significance of the name was lost on us (we later learned that the Longoria family is one of the wealthiest in Nuevo Laredo, with interests in banking, agriculture, and manufacturing), the size and elegance of the bookcases were not. More than twelve feet tall, each was topped with an ornate cornice and featured beveled-glass doors from France. The finish was going to be faux crackle, a technique of which Medina seemed especially proud. The shop was also making all the furniture for Señor Frog’s, a new restaurant (part of the Grupo Anderson’s Carlos’N Charlie’s chain) in Nuevo Laredo. I wouldn’t recommend your wandering in here and asking for a rustic pine table and a couple of high-back chairs. But if you have some serious, extensive woodwork in mind, this is the place. Because every order is different, Medina declined to quote prices.
Marmoles y Canteras de Nuevo Laredo, Avenida General César López de Lara 3126 (the street becomes the Monterrey Highway), 87-14-99-41. Guadalupe Nori runs a straightforward, industrial store offering a modest selection of flooring tiles and a good selection of cantera fountains and columns. Ten-foot columns, assembled from manageable sections for easy hauling, were around $320; fountains, from diminutive to ostentatious, started at $128 and went up to $280. Some oversized double sinks made of a poured terrazzo material (small pieces of stone set in cement and polished), only $22 each, were large enough to bathe a couple of springer spaniels with room to spare.
My Library
