Walk into 9959 W. 143rd St. on a Tuesday afternoon and you might find a baby shower in full swing, wrapping paper on every surface, a dozen women deciding whose turn it is to hold the diaper cake. Walk in on a Thursday evening and it could be a book club, or a networking mixer, or six people hunched over a leatherworking table learning to stitch their first wallet. What you will not find, most days, is a cash register.
That is not a business in decline. It is the same address that launched The Holly House in mid-2024, when Becky Frontera started making baby bibs, blankets and teddy bears and needed somewhere to sell them. Her daughter Samantha helped her find that somewhere. Now the original shop has quietly stopped being a shop at all, and the reason why is the more interesting story than another boutique opening in a Chicago suburb.
The Accident That Forced a Decision
Three months after the Old Orland location opened, Becky Frontera was seriously injured in an accident. Samantha kept the business running on her own, which meant one person doing the work that had been built for two. Something had to give, and what gave was the assumption that one storefront could keep doing everything at once.
Samantha has talked about that stretch directly. She told Patch she made it her mission to keep the shop open for the creators and small businesses who believed in her, and that she never imagined running it without her original partner. She has since said the most meaningful part of the business has been watching creators and customers connect, and that she wants to help makers find what she calls a permanent home.
What happened next was not a single reopening. It was a series of smaller decisions that, added up, turned one shop into a small network with three different jobs.
Three Addresses, Three Different Jobs
In December 2025, The Holly House opened a second location in Chicago's Lincoln Park at 2438 N. Clark St., a full retail storefront offering handmade gifts and permanent jewelry in a neighborhood with no connection to Old Orland's original customer base. Then in July 2026, a second Orland Park storefront opened in Wedgewood Commons at 8104 W. 143rd St., just blocks from where it all started.
The Wedgewood expansion is where the pattern becomes visible. Samantha partnered with Mary Knez of Arrow Permanent Jewelry and with Mario Cisineros of Cisnero's Leather, who makes handmade bags, wallets and belts. Cisineros was not a new relationship. He was one of the shop's very first vendors, back when the whole operation fit inside one small Old Orland storefront. The new location is not a bet on strangers. It is a bet on the people who were already there.
Meanwhile the original Old Orland address never closed. It changed jobs. It now operates as an event and workshop space for book clubs, birthday parties, baby showers and crafting classes, the exact kind of use that a retail floor plan fights against and a dedicated space makes easy.
Here is how the three locations actually divide the work right now:
| Location | Address | What it's for now |
|---|---|---|
| Old Orland (original) | 9959 W. 143rd St., Unit A | Bookable event and workshop space: book clubs, birthdays, baby showers, networking nights |
| Wedgewood Commons (new) | 8104 W. 143rd St. | Retail marketplace with Arrow Permanent Jewelry and Cisnero's Leather |
| Lincoln Park, Chicago | 2438 N. Clark St. | Retail marketplace, handmade gifts, permanent jewelry, seasonal pop-ups |
That split explains something a casual visitor might miss. A shop that looks like it is spreading itself thin is actually doing the opposite. It stopped asking one room to sell candles, host a baby shower and run a leather class on the same Saturday, and gave each job its own address.
What's Actually Bookable This Month
The retail side gets the most attention, but the workshop calendar is where the local texture shows up. Becky Frontera, now recovered enough to teach again, leads a sugar scrub workshop under her own line, Clean Humor Soaps, walking participants through building an all-natural scrub from start to finish. Whistle Notes Perfumery runs a hands-on perfume-making session where guests blend a custom fragrance rather than buy one off a shelf. Mary Knez still does permanent jewelry on site, the welded-on chain bracelets and necklaces that have become a signature offering across both Orland Park locations.
The maker roster behind all of it runs deeper than the two owners. Maureen of Love & Earth Soap has been making personalized soaps since 2018. Sisters Julie and Jaime run Creative Designs by J n J, a business they started in 2022 to stay creatively connected despite living in different states. Hira and Jahangir, a husband and wife team, make candles under the name Love Coco. As of July 2026, the shop's own count put the number of local artisans featured across its gift shops at more than 27, a figure that reflects just how much of the inventory is genuinely handmade rather than wholesaled.
The shop has also picked up outside attention worth knowing about if you're deciding where to spend a Saturday. Co-owner Samantha Frontera appeared on WGN-TV's Daytime Chicago in June 2026 alongside artist Thomas Dunn to demonstrate the kind of art workshops now running out of the Old Orland space, the same segment format the station uses for genuinely local, ongoing programming rather than one-off press hits.
Which Door to Walk Through
If you live near Old Orland and want to buy something handmade this weekend, Wedgewood Commons at 8104 W. 143rd St. is the address that now does that job, with Arrow Permanent Jewelry and Cisnero's Leather on site alongside the rotating maker shelves. If you're trying to book a space for a baby shower, a recurring book club, or a private class, the original 9959 W. 143rd St. location is built for exactly that now, not as a fallback but as its actual current purpose. And if you're heading into the city, the Lincoln Park storefront on Clark Street runs the same retail concept with its own local flavor.
None of this required a grand relaunch or a press release explaining the strategy. It happened the way most good local decisions happen, one address at a time, in response to what an actual family running an actual business needed after things got harder than expected. That is usually a better signal of a business's staying power than any opening-week announcement.
Orland Park has no shortage of retail square footage arriving in the next few years, from the Amazon store planned at 159th and LaGrange to the ongoing Main Street Triangle build-out. What The Holly House is doing at three much smaller addresses is a quieter version of the same instinct: matching a space to the job it's actually good at, rather than asking one room to do everything.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what's changing block by block in Orland Park, whether that's a new storefront in Wedgewood Commons or the way an established neighborhood evolves over time, that's the same lens Aaron Gaines applies to the housing side of this market. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what's happening in Orland Park's neighborhoods, block by block, the same way this one did.
