Continuing with my intermittent series of documenting the small stores that make up our urban landscape, today we see Bella Grace near the Thirroul railway station. I figured that I'd better do this one sooner rather than later as I have some concerns about its longevity. Not because the business is badly run, I hasten to add. In terms of visual merchandising, for instance, I've seldom seen a store do it better. Almost every day the stock is rearranged and an appealing display appears in the window.

No, there are other issues. Notably the parking near the station, which has been almost non-existent on weekdays since the new timetable screwed us over. With stops at the northern stations having been cut, almost everyone in the northern suburbs drives to Thirroul. To get parking for the stores around the station borders on the impossible, and that can't be a good thing for a business like this.

Another is that the prices of the goods are a little on the high side. (As they obviously need to be to cover relatively high costs from a relatively low sales base.) Granted it's selling the sort of bric a brac that you would normally see in glossy interior decorating magazines, and the target market is those who have moved down the coast for a lifestyle change. Generally those people will have a decent disposable income but with so many jobs, even professional ones, being shipped offshore these days there is always a danger of that market drying up.

I thought that I had already missed my chance as a few months ago the woman who then owned it had "Retirement" signs up in the window. However one of her employees bought it out and it has continued running. Not since 1920, though; at the time that I moved down here this building was occupied by the NRMA (motorists' association), and Bella Grace only moved in when they moved out.

This is the first time I've attempted to use the E-M1's in camera HDR settings and I have to admit that I'm very impressed. It managed to resolve the interior and exterior lighting perfectly. The only thing that it didn't handle was the illuminated store sign above and to the left of the main window; that I had to drag in from one of the underexposed images. But beyond that what you see is what it gave.

Postscript July 2022: Oh dear, maybe I should stop doing these. I've updated three so far, and they are all gorrrrrnnnneee, as they say in Australian vernacular. Bella Grace bought the farm some time between November 2016 (when there was a "Business For Sale" sign in the window) and May 2017 when a new business called Luca Luna appeared there. Luca Luna is principally but not exclusively a florist. It also dabbles in jewellery, candles, incense, bath and body products and so on. The prices are... not cheap, as I found out back in 2020 when I was doing a wedding photo shoot and found out how much they would have charged for some small floral adornments. (I don't recall the price now, but I DO recall my jaw leaving an impact mark on the top of my Olympus.) But the formula is clearly working, since here we are 5 years later and the business is still going strong, albeit with a change of ownership in March 2021. So... clearly this series isn't a TOTAL jinx.

The Ray White real estate agency on the right has relocated across the road and down the street. That store is now occupied by an outfit whose identity and reason for existence strike me as being less obvious than those of some of the deeper CIA operations teams. (It's a recruiting agency. No way would you know that without doing a web search, such is the minimalism of the signage.)

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