We started our business more than 20 years ago in a 1912 home built by an Irish contractor. It is located in a neighborhood of Seattle called Ballard, usually more known as the Scandinavian section of town, though it is in fact quite a cosmopolitan place, and in any case most of our Irish customers seem to have married Scandinavians! Only later did we find out that there is a little town in Donegal named “Báile Ard” or “Ballard” as it is anglicized on the bilingual Irish road signs some of which we still sell in the shop! (“Báile Ard” literally means “high town” and I suppose there are more than one such in Ireland!)

We are Evi and Hugh Murray and got the idea of opening this store after our first trip to Ireland where like everyone else we were enchanted by the clothing and crafts—not to say the culture and people long intimately familiar to us as Hugh’s parents were born in Co. Mayo, and Hugh grew up in an all-Irish milieu (though nominally located in New York City) in which both endearments and invective (though not, alas, fluent speech) were in Irish not English. This family treasured the Irish language and culture and wished to see it preserved as a core value of life, and we are proud to display Hugh’s Mother in an old photo of her wonderful skills in Irish Dancing (see picture in the right).

Evi was born in East Germany (now Poland), was raised in Berlin, survived, as we say, more British bombs than have most Irish people—but has become thoroughly “Hibernicized”. Thank God she retains the German energy, talent and organizational skill needed to make for an outstanding business. We are proud to sell T-shirts which say on the front “Irish Temper and German Stubbornness”, a genetic mix our children proudly bear! (There are similar permutations of the American ethnic mix in that line of T-shirts as well!)