Cheryl Landry Baptista, owner of Fabrika
The year after I graduated from college, I spent six months on my own in Europe, bicycling through Holland, Belgium and France, riding a train along the Cote d’Azure of France, across the top of Italy, south through what was then Yugoslavia, down to the tip of the Greek mainland, onto a ferry past many Greek islands, to finally land on the island of Samos, near the coast of Turkey. I found a job as a chambermaid there for a couple of months, and lived in the off-season in a hotel right next door to a lovely old building where the residents of the island brought their olives annually to be pressed for the olive oil they would use for the year. That building they called a “Fabrika”, and I always loved the sound of that name.

Almost a decade later, my brother and I headed west on our bicycles across the United States, west from Plum Island, Massachusetts to Florence, Oregon. Steve flew back home to New England, but I ended up staying with family in southern California, where I met and married a Navy Seabee, and started a family. A part-time job in a fabric store, where I was assigned to the home decorating department, introduced me to the world of custom soft furnishings. I loved it, and went about learning all I could about the art of sewing for the home. Read books, took classes, and finally, with the encouragement of a dear friend and mentor, and producer of incredibly beautiful custom work, I started my own workroom in an extra bedroom of our home in Pensacola, Florida.

Home again, in Massachusetts, Fabrika finally outgrew my basement, and in 2002 I moved to a beautiful space in a building that is part of a shipyard in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Here I’ve been lucky to collaborate with some spectacularly talented designers and their clients to create work that I am very proud of.