Greeting customers are walls of pliers, ratchets, hammers and other tools that one might expect to find in a hardware store, but the store also has various selections of kitchenware, party supplies and other miscellaneous items.
The store is in the process of stocking its shelves, Fechete said this week, but supply chain issues have delayed the arrival of some merchandise. The owner expects the size of the selection to match that of his San Francisco store, with around 10,000 items.
"I love hardware stores," said Palo Alto resident Doria Summa, who was browsing the shelves at Nob Hill earlier this week. "It's very small, but it seems to have a little bit of everything."
Fechete said his San Francisco shop, which coincidentally is located on another street also named California, has been performing well, even in the midst of the pandemic, and so he decided to broker a deal for the 3,155-square-foot space on California Avenue in May 2020. People seemed to have had more free time during the pandemic and embarked on their own home improvement projects, he said.
Fechete said the new location seemed like a great opportunity to introduce his business to people closer to home.
Fechete opened his first store in San Francisco's Nob Hill neighborhood in late 2007 after spending a lot of time in and out of hardware stores as a contractor for nearly a decade.
Fechete said he hopes to provide goods that people may not always find at a mega-hardware retailer, including small items like shoe polish, buttons or needles, as well as expert advice.
The opening of the independent hardware store is a pleasant, and somewhat unexpected, surprise.
Hardware stores tend to disappear more than they pop up, said Steven Staiger, a historian at the Palo Alto Historical Association, who briefly worked at Cambridge Hardware near California Avenue in the 1970s before it closed in 1997.
Summa said she was glad to see Nob Hill open close to her home in the College Terrace neighborhood.
"That's the beauty of living here — a lot is walkable," she said.
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