Jeff and Audrey of Mirabai
Jeff Cuiule & Audrey Cusson
Juliet: What brought you here?
Jeff: I guess it was rather impromptu. I’ll give you a bit of a backstory. Audrey and I lived in the city for about 15 years before we moved up here. (in 2000) We both had corporate careers. I was in advertising and Audrey was in children’s book publishing. At some point we had both reached a limit as to how much further we wanted to go in those careers. We were feeling restless and a little unfulfilled.
Audrey: We were kind of growing apart from the soul of our relationship. He was doing his thing, I was doing my thing, happily going along but we always … work was so important to both of us that we needed to work together.
Jeff: Interestingly, at this period of time we were going through couple’s counseling because of this issue. At the end of our time we determined that that was what we wanted to do. We wanted to work together in some enterprise. We had one idea which was city-centric which we had developed over the course of close to a year. It was encountering some stumbling blocks. We were feeling very frustrated and we were in a session and we were expressing that the idea we had was not really our original idea. Our counselor asked us what it was and neither of us could remember. He asked us to close our eyes, it wasn’t uncommon (smiles).
Audrey: “Here we go again, another visualization exercise …” (both laugh)
Jeff: He said “Lets go through this exercise”.We began calling out one at a time what we were looking for. What we were envisioning was a bookstore. We were envisioning it being in the mountains and it being in a small town and that it would not be too far from the city so that if we wanted to go in every once in a while we still could. It would be an important part of the community. It would serve a real social purpose. It would be a place where we would actually live above the store. At the end of that exercise it was as if a little light bulb went off in our counselor’s head. He said “You know something? I know exactly the actual place that you’re describing. It exists and I know where it is.” So he pointed us here and we came up and we looked at the store and we made up our minds within a couple of weeks that we were going to buy the store. And the rest is history, we just moved up a few months later.
Juliet: Had you been to Woodstock before?
Audrey & Jeff: No!
Juliet: Did you have friends up here?
Audrey: No!
Jeff: Just our counselor.
Audrey: Just the counselor, nothing drawing us here.We thought “Okay why not, lets take a day trip together. We need to do something together anyway.”
Juliet: It was Mirabai already though, right? When did Mirabai open?
Jeff: The store started in April 1987.
Audrey: Coming from book publishing I would never have started from scratch with a book store. This to me was not so scary because it’s more than a bookstore. And it existed.
Juliet: Was there anything interesting with the former owners and you?
Audrey: Yes! Oh, absolutely. When we came, the store Mirabai had been for sale for two years. The owner had such integrity. And really wanted to keep … a lot of people came interested but they wanted to change the whole thing. They wanted to change it into something else.
Jeff: Or they just wanted to buy the property. Or they just wanted to buy the business and not buy the property.
Audrey: Nobody wanted to buy it as a book store.
Jeff: No one wanted the whole thing - the property, the business, and to keep the business focus the same.
Audrey: When we walked in the door and wanted to buy Mirabai, it was just like everybody knew this was it.
Juliet: Who was the owner?
Jeff: Anne Roberts. She moved to Vermont. That’s what her vision was. She wasn’t going to do that until she sold the store.
Juliet: What is your first memory of Woodstock?
Audrey: My first memory (to Jeff) You and I sitting down to lunch at a little coffee shop and I remember looking out the window and feeling the excitement. That’s where I made the decision. I was really enchanted. I was enchanted by the town and I was enchanted by this store. I just knew that everything was going to fall into place. I had been at my job where I didn’t make intuitive decisions, I didn’t make rash decisions. It was something that just fell on my head.
Jeff: To me it felt like I was going to begin this long term vacation. That’s immediately what I felt. It felt very liberating.
Juliet: What’s changed about Woodstock since you’ve been here?
Jeff: Virtually nothing has changed about the town. I don’t think anything is allowed to change (laughs) … which is part of what keeps it so pristine and interesting and funky.
Audrey: Maybe that’s the magical feeling … people keep coming back … because it doesn’t change. And everything else does. Everything else in our lives is changing very rapidly. Woodstock is always Woodstock.
Planning a visit to Woodstock? Consider “Above the Books”, Mirabai’s luxury vacation rental retreat.
Mirabai Books of Woodstock
23 Mill Hill Road Woodstock NY