Northampton Family Store

Trading as a drapery since 1913 in a building raised three years earlier, this country store anchors the heritage main street of Northampton, one of the oldest settlements in Western Australia outside Perth. The stock reads like a rural general store of another era brought forward: clothing, hats and footwear, haberdashery, knitting and crochet supplies, quilting fabric, craft, sunglasses and shelves of local and regional books. A room at the rear holds a museum of more than one hundred sewing machines, viewable for a gold-coin donation and singled out by visitors as a genuine curiosity. Passed through only a handful of owners across its long life, from Stokes to the Williams family drapery until 2003, it has kept its shopkeeping intact rather than modernising it away. On the Hampton Road heritage walk, it reads less as a shop than a working piece of the town's history.