🛋️ From Antique Mall to Full Service Design Studio: Peppard Home + Interiors

🏗️ Nassau Backs $61M Cornerstone Apartments in Downtown Hicksville

🎖️ A 58-Year-Late Purple Heart Finally Comes Home to Rocky Point

🦀 Oyster Bay's Horseshoe Crab Art Show Turns the Tide on a Misunderstood Neighbor

Almost everyone has one. Grandma's credenza, sitting in the same spot for ten years, with a finish you've never liked and a story you can't throw away. Amanda has heard about a thousand of them, and what she noticed early is that the conversation is never really about the furniture. Somebody comes in to talk about a piece and ends up talking about the room, and then about their life, and what they actually want is to walk into their house and love it.

She didn't take a straight line here. Amanda went to school to be a math teacher, ended up in corporate America, and figured out her heart was in interior design, so she went back to school and worked part time for a designer. One day she wandered into an antique store, saw a space for rent sign, and had what she calls her grand business plan: rent the space, build furniture vignettes, meet design clients that way. To transform furniture fast she found a line of chalk paint that needed no sanding, stripping, or priming, and it took over. She became the Long Island distributor, taught classes, and about a year later took over the entire building. Which is how she woke up running an antique mall and a paint store, a long way from design. In 2021 she bought a design studio business and moved into full service interior design. This past January she made the final turn: the antique vendors moved out, the retail tchotchkes went with them, and she bought an upholstery shop.

The building itself is worth the trip. It's an old hotel from 1914 with original tin ceilings and real architecture, restored to the point that people stop in every single day saying they've driven past for years and never knew what was inside. Downstairs is in house upholstery, where they make pillows and cushions on site and reupholster existing furniture, plus a paint studio for refinishing pieces. Upstairs is everything else: wallpaper, and their library is the most extensive on Long Island, along with carpet, lighting, window treatments, decor, artwork, and fully customizable sofas and chairs from three American manufacturers, down to the wood finish, cushion fill, and fabric. Normally a project like yours means the cabinet guy, then the tile store, then the carpet place, then the furniture store, then two hours lost on the internet. Here it's one room.

Sitting down with a designer to build out something like a sofa takes a deposit toward your purchase, so the guidance essentially costs nothing. Bigger jobs get a custom proposal. And browsing the wallpaper, the carpets, or the fabrics is complimentary, which is intentional, because Amanda's position is that hiring an interior designer has always been a luxury and her whole aim is to make it an attainable one. Everybody deserves to walk into a house they love, so the person who just wants custom pillows for their sofa gets the same expertise as the whole home renovation.

They're pushing the complimentary wallpaper sessions right now, which is usually how people discover everything else. Longer term she wants to launch e-commerce and virtual design so people outside the area can work with them. Ask her the real goal and she'll tell you: a television show, so she can teach the world how to transform a space.

Head to peppardhome.com, or call, text, or stop in. They're open 10 to 5 Monday through Friday for walk ins, though an appointment gets you dedicated time. There's a coffee bar by the front door, and if the occasion calls for it, champagne.

Join us in welcoming Peppard Home + Interiors to the neighborhood spotlight, a business that started as one rented corner of somebody else's store and now owns the building, run by a woman who understands that nobody has ever really been asking about the credenza.

Downtown Hicksville's long revitalization push just picked up another building block. The Nassau County Industrial Development Agency approved financial assistance for Cornerstone, a $61 million, 106-unit apartment complex planned for the heart of the village, clearing the way for sales and mortgage tax exemptions along with a 20-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement.

The 184,214-square-foot building will bring a mix of studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms, with 13 apartments set aside as affordable housing for renters earning 80 percent of the area median income. Plans also call for more than 230 parking spaces, a fitness center, a clubroom and co-working space, plus a slice of ground-floor commercial storefronts.

It's part of a broader wave of downtown Hicksville projects that have been years in the making, aimed at turning the area around the LIRR station into a walkable, denser hub. Construction on Cornerstone is expected to break ground in early 2027, so don't expect cranes just yet, but the financing piece was the hurdle that had to clear first.

👉 Read more: Long Island Press

Some paperwork just takes longer than others. U.S. Army veteran Daniel Knote, 79, was finally awarded a Purple Heart at a ceremony in Rocky Point on Purple Heart Day, nearly six decades after a clerical error left it out of his official service record. Knote was wounded in South Vietnam at age 21 while helping pull a fellow soldier, Mike Beck, to safety under fire.

He came home, worked 31 years for the Long Island Rail Road, then more years with the U.S. Department of Transportation, and never once asked anyone to fix the record. It only came to light recently as old injuries from the wound began catching up with him, and he reached out to Rep. Nick LaLota's office, whose staff tracked down what had been missing since Vietnam.

Knote, true to form, downplayed the whole thing. "I don't consider myself the hero. I did my job," he said. His wife, Virginia, put it a little differently: she said what she's most proud of is that he went for a purpose in the first place, medal or no medal.

👉 Read more: ABC7 New York

Horseshoe crabs don't usually get the glamour treatment, but Hive Market and Gallery in Oyster Bay is giving them one anyway. "Horseshoe Crab and Friends," a new exhibition running through September 20, features more than 30 works by Long Island artists celebrating horseshoe crabs and the other marine life that calls the Long Island Sound estuary home.

The show, hosted by Hive in partnership with Friends of the Bay, spans paintings, photography, jewelry, mixed media and pieces created directly on naturally molted horseshoe crab shells. A portion of every sale goes back to Friends of the Bay's conservation and education work along the shoreline.

Friends of the Bay executive director Christine Suter said the goal is simple: get people to see horseshoe crabs the way environmentalists do, as one of the oldest and most quietly important creatures in the bay, instead of just something to step around at low tide.

👉 Read more: Herald Community Newspapers

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