Harvard Square’s Black Ink is a store that can turn 20 feet into half an hour. What looks like a wall of shelves can turn into an afternoon of shopping, since it takes an unexpectedly long time to explore this compact space. Stepping in feels less like entering a store than a modern-day cabinet of curiosities. Glass bowls brim with tops, elastics, and oversized paper clips. Cubic shelves vault 11 feet to the ceiling and are replete with colorful tea sets, posters, and matchbook gardens.

It’s not just the quirky and beautiful products that attract people, but the store’s design. The towering shelves order the chaos and feel limitless. It’s an experience more akin to entering a museum than shopping, and Black Ink isn’t alone. The arrangement and design of shops throughout Cambridge and Boston often look more like products of curation than merchandising—schemes that result from personal, aesthetic choices from the owners that often happen to appeal to a variety of buying customers.

But can the practice of curating, an art in its own right, be applied to pushing product? Even though it serves a definite commercial end, the idea of “curating” a store may not necessarily be dismissed as just marketing, without art or design. Maybe it’s a form of art that brings beauty into the everyday.

CREATURE COMFORTS

As snow accumulates rapidly and melts on my glasses, I finally spot Bobby from Boston, a vintage menswear store. Tucked away among several galleries and cafes, it rests on the gentrified edge of the South End. I quickly turn up a narrow cobblestone alley and duck into the shop for refuge from the snow.

The store is warm and inviting, like an old library. Dark, weathered wood lines the store, and hanging, glowing orbs shed a soft, incandescent light. Owner Bobby Garnett has just gone out for a cigarette, but I don’t mind. As a keen thrift-shopper, I look through the dark, clean shelves of pants, jackets, and boots. The experience is worlds away from thrifting. It’s sometimes difficult to believe that the apparel is used.

Bobby from Boston was founded in 1992, but Bobby’s been in the business for more than 40 years. His first shop opened in ’71—a leather shop, totally different from the one I’m sitting in now. “The other shops I had were more of an Art Deco, chrome and glass feel.” Sounds keen.

But the decor of Bobby from Boston is a long way from Art Deco. “We try to have the feeling of [a store of the era]… anywhere between the 1800s to the 1930s,” he says. He was first inspired by a vintage store in Philadelphia—a small place called “Rosebud.” It was the first vintage store’s interior that he really liked.