Relocated by County’s Plans for Permanent Shelter, Found in Ithaca Eyes Bigger Future at SouthWorks
Shubha Gautam | Jul 18, 2025 | Ithaca.com
Selling a variety of furniture, jewelry, art and ephemera, Found in Ithaca houses a tasteful arrangement of hand-picked antique and vintage items from its 45 dealers. Although currently located in a 7,000 square-foot former factory at 227 Cherry St., the business will soon move to 620 S. Aurora St.. Its present space will house a permanent county homeless shelter.
When current owner Vanessa Weber learned that Found was up for sale last March, she said she “jumped at the opportunity” to buy it. For 15 years, the business has provided the Ithaca community with affordable furniture and decor from its rented Cherry Street location, but Weber said she could not afford to buy the property. So, when Tompkins County bought the site, the acquisition did not come as a surprise to her. Although disappointed to be moving locations, Weber said she welcomes the county’s mission to turn it into a homeless shelter.
According to Weber, since Found’s new location is still under construction, the county set up a six-month lease with the store that has since been extended. While the tentative time for opening their new location is still up in the air, Weber expects it to be during the fall or early winter of this year.
“We've been really on the hunt since day one [...] to find a new location,” Weber said. “And let me tell you, it is a challenge in Ithaca to find spots. I love Ithaca, but it's an expensive place to be, and there were very few places that we could afford, [...] [that] were big enough [and] had parking. SouthWorks was one of the very few — if pretty much the only — place that sort of met our needs.”
Found’s new location is the former Morse Chain building, a historic manufacturing complex set to be repurposed into a commercial and residential neighborhood called SouthWorks. It is located behind Ithaca College and the South Hill Business Campus.
Hosting items from 45 different vendors, Found sells various antique and vintage pieces curated to the Ithaca community. It hopes to serve more vendors at its new location.
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FOUND Prepares for New Location, Plans to Expand
Moving locations for a business comes with some anxiety, Weber said, as you have to rely on having a strong customer base that will continue to seek your services at your new site. But although the move will be a “hassle,” she admits that the current warehouse is not ideal. The building is dusty, cell reception is poor, and the roof leaks from new spots with each rainfall.
Found’s soon-to-be home will be almost three times the size of its current location.
Weber said the 20,000 square feet will not all be used for retail, and that she is looking for local artists and musicians to rent the space for studios. But she said she is also looking to increase the number of vendors she hosts.
“I'd love to give [vendors] the floor space that they have been asking for for years,” Weber said. “The nice thing about Found is that I think we're beloved enough by the community [...] that our vendors do well for the most part. We try to keep the commission low, so they're really taking home most of what they sell. [...] I'd love to expand to include more people, and then just keep doing what we're doing and not really change the model, [which primarily sells] affordable, beautiful, well-finished, well-curated [and] reused objects.”
In the meantime, Weber is getting ready for yet another addition to her business. Within the next two weeks, she plans to launch Art and Found, a store that will act as an extension of Found but with a greater emphasis on art, with both contemporary and vintage pieces from local artists. It will be located in Dewitt Mall between Pastimes Antiques and Treasures and Moosewood. She hopes to display pieces that get lost on the walls of Found while also supporting her partner’s brother’s dream of opening an art gallery.
Art and Found will open in the next two weeks. Found will remain conducting business as usual on Cherry St. until a few days before the move this fall. Weber said her mission is to curate products for the Ithaca community, and the coming additions will help her reach that goal.
“I think something that sort of sets us apart is we're not only reselling these really beautiful and sometimes iconic pieces of furniture and art decor affordably, but [that] most of my vendors [sell] finished pieces,” Weber said. “So they really save a lot of our Ithaca furniture stock from landfills and just sort of keep things in the community and keep the community in style.”