Follow your nose to the Barrs’ K. Hall Designs
By Christy Marshall
Photography by Frank Di Piazza
Kelley Hall met her husband, John Barr, on a train. In 2001. She was traveling with her siblings from Chicago to New Orleans. They were playing euchre and needed a fourth. Hall asked Barr. “And that was pretty much it,” says Hall, now Barr.
While that meeting may have been serendipity, Kelley Barr’s road in life has been anything but. A born entrepreneur, her first venture was loading up her red wagon with corn picked from a nearby field and trying to sell it to neighbors. The harvest was pig corn; she, then five, didn’t sell an ear.
But undeterred, she continued—first selling hand-painted t-shirts in her mother’s eight lingerie stores and, when she was 19, bath and body products cooked up in her kitchen. Then she grew up and worked for others, but along the way finessed her own line. As a buyer for home and garden centers in Michigan, bath products were one of her categories. She didn’t like what she found. “There were a lot of products that were packaged really beautifully but really had no guts, or vice versa: you found these great products which were just packaged poorly,” Barr says. “I started the company on the foundation of quality ingredients that smelled great, really actually worked, and were classically visually appealing.”
In 1998, once she had her products, she packed her bags, grabbed her best friend and went to New York. She sold the entire line to Waterworks—and all of their 65 stores.
Now K. Hall Designs is run by John Barr and is sold by nearly 1,000 stores, mostly high-end boutiques like Sallie Home. But if you want all the products K. Hall Designs makes, as well as a variety of home accessories (including fabulous pottery by Barbara Eigen), go to University City, take Delmar to Midland and stop before Olive at what was once Rolf’s Auto Repair. It’s now an apothecary shop filled with scents and soaps and so much more.
The line includes everything from sheet sprays to soaps, scent diffusers (their biggest seller, $42) to bath salts ($22), body lotions and washes ($19), detergents and fabric softeners to candles.
K. Hall Designs products are available in 14 different scents. Just added are four new diffuser offerings: verbena, cocoa and almond, Egyptian jasmine and persimmon. The store will make up gift baskets; recipients can come in and switch out products as they wish.
“There are things we can’t ship because we don’t want to use preservatives, but we can put them in the store,” Kelley Barr says.
Add the home accessories and there’s plenty to tempt you. And, undoubtedly, you’ll go home in a daze of fine scents, with something that smells superbly sweet.
where is it?
K. Hall Designs
941 Midland
314-862-0777
Hours: Mon-Fri 9 a.m.–6 p.m., Sat 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
