Chat Noir closes shop
Bryan Munn hasn’t gotten his flu shot. “I’ve never had a flu shot,” he said, perched behind the counter of his antiques store, Chat Noir, under an enormous old advertisement for Black Cat Cigarettes on a bright Thursday afternoon. “I went to my first doctor’s appointment in twenty years yesterday. I haven’t had a family doctor in a very long time. Now that I’m old, I’ve decided that’s probably a bad thing.”
Bryan knows old. An antiques dealer for about twenty years and owner (along with his wife Kara) of Meow! and Chat Noir, Bryan is a tall, slim fellow, his height exaggerated by the short cut of his vintage pinstripe jacket, worn over a vest and a pink Chanel tie. “I’m very fashionable today,” he said, laughing. His grey mop is swept back off his forehead — “It’s naturally curly, which my wife hates, so I just kind of scroosh it back. Sometimes I put stuff in it. Sometimes I just let it get nice and greasy, so it won’t curl on me.” When he’s not running one of his stores or hunting for antiques, Bryan writes about comics for Sequential, a Canadian comics blog — and, like fellow Guelph local and comic aficionado, Seth, he’s a walking advertisement for vintage chic.
Chat Noir, the store he opened on Wilson Street in 2009, is filled with a mix of genuine antiques, faithful reproductions, and new items aspiring to vintage status – kazoos, games, wind-up toys, brooches, flasks, lava lamps, and other knickknacks, as well as a cluster of Beatrix Potter books, a few old issues of Playboy, tons of retro greeting cards, and lots of records. And everything is on sale, because on Sunday, Jan. 26, Chat Noir closes its doors for good.
Bryan and Kara opened Meow!, a vintage clothing store on Carden Street, in 2007. “When we first opened Meow!,” said Bryan, “people said, ‘Oh, you’re opening an antiques store in Guelph,’ and I said, ‘Are you crazy?’” Nonetheless, just a couple years later, they opened Chat Noir at the Wilson Street location, formerly the home of Brook’s Antiques. “They gave up the ghost, which should have been a good sign. But initially we had some success. And the place has always paid the bills.”
Bryan found himself scaling down, selling fewer large items and more greeting cards and kitschy stocking-stuffers. These days, if the store is known for anything, it’s more the vinyl than the antiques. “It’s been my salvation,” said Bryan, the Mound City Blue Blowers wailing on ancient CD technology in the background. “Vinyl has become, without me really working on it, a third of my business.” Now, while Bryan and Kara are not really getting out of antiques — they’ll still be making regular appearances at the Aberfoyle Antique Market in the summer — they are shuttering Chat Noir to focus their attention elsewhere. “I really can’t split myself in two,” said Bryan.
On Sunday Jan. 19, a week before Chat Noir closes for good, Bryan relaxed behind the counter while Kara stands on the other side, discussing the name of their new record business. When Chat Noir closes up, they’ll move all the vinyl into a space at the front of Meow!, and the name they settled on, Black Cat Vinyl, has been claimed by some guy in Toronto. “We were thinking of ‘Mr. Meow!,’ but nobody seemed to like that,” said Kara, a short woman with red hair and poofy peroxide bangs. “So, what do you think?” she asked. “I’m putting in the order for the sign in an hour. Speak now or forever hold your peace!”
“It’s fine,” replied Bryan, complacently snacking on Triscuits. And then it is settled: Royal Cat Records, a full-service record store featuring new and used vinyl, will open as soon as Chat Noir closes. But Royal Cat Records won’t be their only new venture. As early as March, they’ll be opening Sweet!, an old-fashioned ice cream and candy store in the former location of the Wild Organic Way, just a few doors down from Meow!. “The two of us were sitting outside Meow! on a very hot day last summer eating ice cream,” said Kara. “People kept coming up to us and asking where we got the ice cream, and we said, ‘Nowhere close by.’ And we thought, ‘Why hasn’t somebody done that?’ When the space came up — our dream location — we applied for it.” Applying their vintage aesthetic to an ice cream and candy store might produce something similar to the Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe from the old Archie comics that Bryan sells in Chat Noir: obscure soft drinks in glass bottles, floats, sundaes, retro candy.
With two new businesses to start up, Bryan and Kara have their hands full — “No sleep for us for the next month or so,” said Kara, with a sigh — but the result might be a new business, designed in a similar manner to Chat Noir and Meow!, that it feels as if it has always been there, suffused in a timeless, youthful nostalgia.