‘End of an era’: Daughter says goodbye to mother’s Hilton Head business after 29 years
When you walk into Taffeta, a store nestled into Hilton Head Island’s Shelter Cove Harbour, you can feel that it’s a family store.
Amid the racks of clothes, purses and jewelry, you’ll find photos of smiling faces of the Landwehr family tucked into an office behind the front desk.
One of those faces in the photos that decorate the office wall is Gianna Landwehr, who opened the store in 1989 when Hilton Head wasn’t yet plagued by traffic and each street wasn’t bustling with storefronts and restaurants.
“It was her dream,” Sonia Landwehr Hunt, Gianna’s daughter, said Wednesday.
Sonia’s parents met in Bermuda in the 1960s. They later married and had two children — Sonia and her brother Aldo.
The Landwehrs eventually moved back to Italy, Gianna’s home country. Once there, Sonia said her parents ran a hotel along the Adriatic Sea until she was 6 years old.
But the opportunity to own their own business elsewhere pushed Gianna and her family to move to Hilton Head Island in 1980, when they opened up two restaurants — The Cookery and Little Venice.
Sonia started first grade on the island. She only spoke a few words of English.
A few years later, a store space opened up, and Gianna jumped at the chance to start her own store.
“She told my dad that he was going to sell one of the restaurants so she could follow her dream,” Sonia said.
And Taffeta became a reality.
Sonia slowly started to learn the family business at the age of 16 when her mother started bringing her to Paris with her to meet designers, learn about fashion and buy merchandise for the store.
“I don’t know if, in her mind, it was a way of giving me some sort of training, but she also wanted me to have a cultural experience,” Sonia said.
A year later, Gianna was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
“It was devastating,” Sonia said. “Nobody knew anyone in the family who had cancer, so it was a new experience for all of us.”
As her mother’s health declined, in 2008, Sonia moved back to Hilton Head from North Carolina, where she’d gotten her undergrad degree in ceramics and studied art for her master’s at UNC Chapel Hill. Her daughter Deia and partner Kevin Eichner came as well.
“One of the reasons I took over the store was because she was not completely well and wanted to enjoy her life,” Sonia said of her mother. “I had been traveling with her for so many years that I felt pretty comfortable moving down here and helping her.”
The pair worked together for a year at the store. Their relationship evolved to feel more like that of sisters as they spent many late nights at the store before getting dinner together after.
“It was such a great opportunity to get to know her as more than just my mother,” Sonia said. “We just had fun. We laughed a lot. We sold a lot, and we were busy.”
The joy of working together was short-lived. In 2009, Aldo was killed in a motorcycle crash in Indonesia.
“My mom’s health declined after that, and she died a year later,” Sonia said. “It was all a big sudden change.”
With the help of employees whom her mother had hired and her mother’s customers, Sonia was able to run the store for the next eight years.
“It was healing to be here in this place,” she said.
But now it is time for a change.
Sonia has decided to close the store and move back to North Carolina full time to open an art studio outside of Chapel Hill. The store is hosting a large sale ahead of the closing. A definite closing date has not yet been determined.
The move is bittersweet, but it’s what Gianna would have wanted her to do, Sonia said.
“It’s the end of an era,” Sonia said. “This was my mom’s dream. ... There’s like a sort of final goodbye to this business that is very close to me.”
“But at the same time I’m ready, and I have no regrets. I think my mom would have been proud. She probably would say go for it.”
This story was originally published December 12, 2018 at 2:10 PM.
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