The favorite room from Nicole Mata’s childhood wasn’t really a room. It was her grandmother’s attic in Pennsylvania, lined with rows of racks - garment bags, dresses, shoes, hats, and purses gathered over a lifetime. Her grandfather was an Army colonel stationed in Germany, where the couple entertained constantly and her grandmother kept something to wear for every occasion. Nicole spent hours up there, trying on other people’s glamour.
Then, when she was around nine, an aunt moved her grandmother into a retirement community and gave the whole collection to Goodwill. “I never got over it,” Mata says. Decades later, that attic is essentially the business she runs today.
That business is This & That Vintage, which opened a private showroom this spring on the second floor of the historic Equinox Junior building on Manchester Village’s Main Street. The room is full of clothing and accessories that have already lived one life, and Mata’s willing to bet that they’re ready for another. Revive, rewear, relove, as the shop puts it.
Mata didn’t set out to sell clothes. She spent years as an event planner and designer, and when the pandemic wiped every event off the calendar, she needed something to do with herself. “I’m not good at being bored,” she says. She started selling housewares on Instagram, which became a booming business at the time, but kept drifting back to the jewelry and clothing she had been walking past at estate sales. “I was tired of seeing it and passing it by, so I figured I’d pick up a couple of pieces.” People loved them.
Clothing takes up space, though, and before long it took up more than her house could hold. So she rented a studio in Cross River, New York, in Westchester County, to store inventory and run her live sales. She would work with the door open, and people in the building started knocking - could they come in, could they buy something. “Sure,” she told them. When a storefront opened downstairs, she took it, and a pandemic hobby turned into a five-year run as a Cross River boutique.
The move to Vermont was about family - her kids, the schools, a slower pace than New York. The Matas relocated to Manchester last summer, and for a while Mata ran the New York store from a distance, with a staff she still misses and monthly trips down to refresh the floor and see clients. Then the building that housed the store sold. She read it as a sign, packed everything up, and went looking for a space of her own up north.
That part nearly didn’t happen. Manchester retail is hard to crack - she kept running into triple-net leases that are tough for any small shop to carry - and the weekend she drove down to empty out the New York store, she still had nowhere to bring it. “I figured we’d just put it in storage or in the basement,” she says. Then her phone buzzed: a text from the woman who ran the yoga studio upstairs in the Equinox Junior building, relayed through a mutual hairdresser friend. They were giving up their space. Would Nicole want it? Two days later, it was hers.
The space matters to Mata more than square footage usually matters to a retailer. Her last shop lived in an old barn, and she is drawn to rooms that already have something to say. “Putting your business in a space that inspires you - I don’t want to be somewhere with no character,” she says. She painted the Equinox Junior space herself, added track lighting, and arranged the whole thing the way someone trained to do it would. [If shops with a past are your thing, you are in good company in Vermont right now - from an 1800s barn turned shopping destination to a firehouse gallery where every piece has a story.]
And she was trained to do it. Mata holds two degrees from the Fashion Institute of Technology, one in fashion merchandising and marketing and one in display and exhibit design, plus a stint doing display work for Crate & Barrel. Finding the pieces is one passion; staging them is the other. The result certainly reads more like a small museum than a thrift store. She set it up, she says, “like it’s somebody’s dream closet.”
Walk in and she will give you a quick tour: “necklace world,” a wall of scarves and handkerchiefs that were among her best sellers in New York, a purse wall, belts, shoes, and a well-lit corner she calls the closet, staged like the one you wish you had at home. Then she gets out of your way.
She wants you to touch things, try them on, take your time. “It’s a full sensory experience, especially with vintage,” she says. The collection runs to the 1980s and earlier, with some 1990s pieces edging in - which, she will admit with a laugh, now counts as vintage too.
Part of what she is selling is memory. “I love when someone comes in and says, ‘I remember my mom had this piece,’” she says. “It takes them down memory lane.”
Almost everything arrives through consignment, and almost all of that through word of mouth. Being so close to New York City helped; over the years Mata built a network of consignors who bring her serious pieces, sometimes whole estates at a time. One entire wall of the Manchester showroom came from a single woman’s collection. She does not take everything - she curates to her own eye and era, and she is glad to point sellers elsewhere when a piece is not right for the shop. If you think you have something that belongs there, she asks that you reach out and send photos.
Mata was not sure how a vintage showroom would land here. Opening weekend answered the question. “I was amazed at the outpouring,” she says - visitors and locals both, all looking for something they could not find anywhere else. She expects her regulars to be travelers, second-home owners, and locals with an eye for the unusual, and she has stocked the room widely enough that most people will find something that stops them.
She is also arriving at a good moment for the neighborhood. Manchester’s historic district has been coming back to life - the marble sidewalks restored, new independents opening their doors, places like Earth Sky Time pulling people down the hill. “There’s so much magic down in the historic district,” she says. “It shouldn’t be ignored.”
The events background has not gone anywhere. Mata plans to open the showroom to the public about once a month, and she wants to host private “sip and shop” evenings - a group of friends, cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, browsing or just enjoying the room. She is also toying with small how-to sessions, like bringing in someone who knows the dozen ways to tie a scarf to teach the rest of us. “I love getting people together,” she says.
For now, This & That Vintage runs by private appointment and the occasional open-shopping day, with hours still settling in. The simplest way in is to call or email, watch the shop’s Instagram for open days, or browse the collection online.
It's not her grandmother’s attic in Pennsylvania. But it is the same impulse that started up there - keep the beautiful things in circulation, and find each one the next person who will love it.
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