By Angela Rogalski
Tradition. Beauty. Style. Lina’s Interiors, located at 109 E. 3rd St. in downtown Leland Miss., offers antiques, home décor and unique gifts in an atmosphere of charm and understated elegance.
Lina’s Interiors first opened its doors in 1953 in Greenville. The family-owned business began as a full-service interior design shop that had its own workroom onsite. Patty Gibbs, the original Lina’s daughter, is owner and relocated the shop to Leland about a year and a half ago.
Betty Lewis and Cheryl Hollis have been working with Gibbs for many years. Lewis is Gibbs’ daughter and has been a part of Lina’s for most of her life, having worked after school when she was growing up. And Hollis has been at Lina’s since 2004. So both women have a deep and meaningful commitment to the business.
“My grandmother was Lina,” Lewis says, “and she and her husband opened the interior design firm in 1953. Lina was my mother’s mother and an interior designer by trade. The store originated in Greenville and operated there for over sixty years. We moved here to Leland just a little over a year ago.”
Lewis says the business has morphed a bit over the years. When her grandmother opened the business it was a complete design firm, today it’s a retail showroom of antiques, home décor and unique gifts for your home.
“It started as an interior design and antiques firm,” Lewis adds. “Just out of my grandmother’s love for antiques
and nice things. She was an interior designer and that’s where it began, with her love for what she did. But since then, while we’ve continued with the antiques certainly, we also have a wholesale line where we import Italian tassels and trim and sell them to interior designers and shops all over the country.”
Cheryl Hollis says that Lina’s also sells unique gifts that Patty Gibbs sometimes hand-designs for the store. “Patty can take a beautiful antique candlestick and turn it into an exquisite lamp, but all our gifts are very special and customers love them. From furniture to lamps to picture frames, we have all kinds of gifts.”
Lewis adds that Lina’s is also a store where customer service is top priority. “We’re certainly no chain store, we’re a small, family-owned business that prides ourselves on unique home furnishings and gifts, but above all, great customer service.”
Both women say they really love what they do and enjoy connecting their customers with just the right gift or piece of furniture for their homes or families.
“When a customer returns to the store and shares with us how perfect the piece of furniture they bought fits into their home or how the gift they purchased was just the right thing for the person they bought it for,” Hollis says, “that does make us very happy.”
And Lewis adds that their business is such a generational connection due to the years they have served the Mississippi Delta.
“We have customers who are the children or grandchildren of people who shopped with my grandmother,” she says. “It’s the people who shop with us and support us that make what we do so special.”