Couple remain apart so wife will keep her sense of smell for Barrington perfume business
As a perfumer, Dana Merrill Brown is particularly worried about getting COVID-19 because losing her sense of smell - a common side effect of the respiratory disease - would be disastrous.
That's what led the 57-year-old Colorado woman to spend the last year apart from her husband, Peter Brown, whom she last saw when they were both in the suburbs in February 2020.
That's when he got a new job in Rosemont and the couple together toured properties for sale, eventually setting their sights on a three-story building at 125 E. Main St. in downtown Barrington. They would live on the upper floors, and Merrill Brown would open her Kamala's Own Perfumery store at ground level.
She flew back home to Colorado with plans to pack up and move to Illinois. Instead, COVID-19 hit and she found herself stuck at home, waiting out the pandemic in an effort to be as safe as possible. Her parents lived in Denver and her mother died in July, she said.
"It hasn't been easy," Merrill Brown said. "But I talk to my husband on the phone every day and we FaceTime."
The couple closed on the Barrington building Monday, she said. Her husband, who's lived in a hotel for the past year, will move in this weekend.
She will join him as soon as she gets a COVID-19 vaccine, which she hopes will happen in May or June, she said. Her 30-year-old son also plans to move to Barrington.
"We looked in a lot of areas and we found this building, and we thought it was perfect," Merrill Brown said of the 5,800-square-foot building from 1933 that used to house Christian Science Reading Room, which moved in the fall into the new church building in Barrington.
Merrill Brown runs her business online at kamalas-own.myshopify.com, offering more than 500 scents, including pure essential oils, which are distilled from a single plant and have therapeutic benefits; fragrance oils, which are synthetic scents; aromatherapy blends made from pure essential oils; and perfume scents, made from essential oils and fragrance oils.
Kamala is a nickname an old boyfriend gave her after the character in the novel "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse, she said. Many people now call her Kamala.
Perfumery became a career after it started as a hobby during her days as a student at Harvard University, Merrill Brown said. She initially wanted to become a diplomat but decided against it after moving to China to teach English and meeting "fantastically unhappy" diplomats, she said.
She lived in Illinois in the 1990s and early 2000s, opening two perfumery stores in Champaign and two in Evanston before moving to Colorado in 2004, she said.
She never found a good place to open a store in Colorado Springs, she said, so she's been running her business online and at the Colorado Renaissance Festival, Bristol Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin and other fairs.
COVID-19 shut down fairs last year, but her business - thanks to a robust marketing effort and the "Faire Relief" Facebook group with more than 51,000 members - is strong, she said.
She's been wanting to move to Illinois for a few years, she said, and hopes to make it to Barrington as soon as possible.