Shopping in Cambridge

According to the Washington Post, Brenda and George Davis have built more than 500 custom-made cornhole sets over a two-year period. Like all of the pieces that come out of their workshop, these custom beanbag games are made and finished by hand and created through collaboration with the client. Boards can be decorated with the client’s favorite sports team’s colors and logos, but other designs have included musical bands, landscapes, and cartoon characters. The family also crafts traditional furniture pieces as well as custom pieces such as toy chests, wine cabinets, rocking chairs, and even birdhouses fashioned to look like football players' heads.

At All Seasons Garden Center, the yard experts empower customers to complete home-landscaping projects. The landscapers stand at the ready to help them hone in on the best materials for their endeavor, whether patrons want to lay a decorative-stone patio or erect a stone wall tall enough to keep out Godzilla. To help customers get their goods back to home base, they rent out their delivery truck for large orders of sand, stone, and natural or dyed mulch.

Beneath damask-patterned walls and soft curtains, red poufs give guests a cushy surface on which to try on the shoes they’ve plucked from the swank store’s glossy, white shelves. In addition to housing a wide selection of shoes, which ranges from heel-free flats to pumps designed to lend wearers a competitive edge in slam-dunk contests, staffers fill the often-rotating inventory with trendy accoutrements such as jewels, cheetah prints, and handbags accented with grommets and charms. They also sling unique pieces of jewelry, including demure pearl earrings and spiked bracelets.

They host a ladies' night every month, inviting clients to peruse new styles while sampling crudités and other treats.

Hyatt & Co. adds a note of refinement to men's wardrobes by filling them with formal and casual clothes from labels such as Tommy Bahama, JJ Weston, Vannucci, and Luchiano Visconti. The friendly tailoring team—Rocky, Marc, Ray, Justin, Harvey, and Eddie—greets visitors at the Maple Lawn shop and helps them pick the perfect cloth for a fine Italian suit or wade through a wide selection of T-shirts, satin ties, cufflinks, and jeans. They use their adept fitting skills to slide torsos into becoming formalwear including suits that cut a classic, Sinatra-esque figure and tuxedos spiffier than that of Fred Astaire's best man.

Poppy and Stella’s knack for curating a stylish, eclectic inventory has not gone unnoticed. “The people behind Poppy and Stella just get shoes,” according to the Baltimore City Paper, who named Poppy and Stella the Best Women’s Shoe Store in 2009. In 2011, CBS Baltimore praised Poppy and Stella for its “atmosphere, selection and service.”

That atmosphere is found in a tidy, eclectic boutique, where customers can peruse a stylish array of designer shoes, boots, handbags, and apparel from brands such as Dolce Vita, Pour La Victoire, Sam Edelman, and Frye. Throughout the store, neat displays highlight both seasonal trends and classic designs, all of which can keep friends and neighbors from giving you disparaging nicknames like “old-shoes Jack.”