Dale Chihuly, internationally renowned glass artist and former Rhode Island School of Design faculty member, left Providence in 1982 to settle back in his hometown of Seattle.
But he remembers Adler’s Design Center and Hardware.
“I miss things like Adler’s Hardware,” he said in a recent interview. “They always took care of their artist friends.”
That’s true, according to Marc Adler, co-owner with his cousin Harry Adler, of the hardware store and design center that has been a fixture on an ever-changing Wickenden Street since 1919.
“We do take good care of our artist friends,” Marc Adler said. “We try to take good care of everybody.” A significant number of college students, many from RISD, find their way to Adler’s with what Marc Adler called “unique needs” related to school projects they are working on. The students “don’t always know what’s available in terms of products,” he said. “We try to help them any way we can.”
Located at the busiest part of Wickenden Street, near the Benefit Street intersection, with an ample parking lot around the corner, Adler’s has been well-known for years for its unique supply of hardware items and in recent times has added emphasis on paint products and home-decorating goods.
Marc Adler’s grandfather, Fred Adler, opened the store as an Army and Navy surplus store, selling such goods as the Army jackets that were popular among protesters in the 1960s and 1970s, backpacks, boots, work clothes and all sorts of military leftovers. It was a line of goods the store retained until about 10 years, Marc Adler said.
The sons of Fred Adler – Irving Adler, Marc’s father, and Carl Adler, Harry’s father, who both died in 2005 – took over the business after World War II and, during the housing boom of the 1950s, added hardware products to their inventory. Harry Adler came into the business about 30 years ago, Marc Adler said, and Marc has been involved for 23 years.
Today, the Adler cousins and Marc’s mother, Betty Adler, run the operation. Betty Adler likes to say she is semiretired, but her son disputes that notion. “No,” he said with a grin, “she works full time” as bookkeeper and in the tough job of credit manager.
On a recent weekday afternoon, Adler’s was bustling with at least a dozen customers of all ages looked through items such as the extensive line of decorative hardware that Adler’s offers in the form of door and cupboard knobs, door handles (some with locks), door knockers, towel bars and other bathroom accessories. Marc Adler calls the store’s line of decorative hardware “a level up from what you’d see” in a big-box store.
The unique pieces come from all over the country, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois and California.
Unhappy with the quality of national brand-name paints, Adler’s about 10 years ago joined with other paint dealers in North America to form their own company, The Coatings Alliance, that can manufacture interior and exterior paint to exact color specifications. “The beauty of it is it allows us to control the quality of the paint,” Marc Adler said.
A second benefit is that The Coatings Alliance produces so-called “paint chips” in the form of hefty 18-by-24-inch sheets made completely of paint, so a customer can take home what Marc Adler called a “super-large” swath and get a better idea of how it would look.
Design consultants at Adler’s are available to help customers, both in the store and during at-home visits, to advise on wallpaper and custom-made window treatments. The latter includes “hard and soft” window accessories, Marc Adler noted, meaning shutters and blinds as well as curtains and shades. Filled with books of colorful cloth swatches, the design center also offers custom-made bedspreads, tablecloths, pillows and does furniture upholstery as well.
And, of course, as you might expect to see in a hardware store, there are shelves full of irons, ironing boards, clocks, frying pans, dish towels and oven mitts, wheelbarrows and ladders, colanders, vacuum cleaners and a bin full of braided utility rope.
Marc Adler says the store has flourished in spite of widespread competition over the years from national chain outfits and today’s big-box stores because, “We offer a level of service people can’t get in other places and a level of quality you don’t find everywhere.
“I find customers today are so grateful for customer service, when you just do little things for them,” he said. “It’s very rare now not to be thanked at the end of a sale.” •
COMPANY PROFILE
Adler’s Design Center and Hardware
OWNERS: Marc Adler and Harry Adler
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Retail hardware, paint and decorative products
LOCATION: 173 Wickenden St., Providence
EMPLOYEES: 25
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1919
ANNUAL SALES: WND
