Jessica Brunsting has run HoughtonHill, known to regulars simply as HH, since 2002, when she started out making jewelry and supplying it to local Anchorage boutiques before eventually opening a storefront of her own. Over more than two decades the business moved through several Anchorage locations before consolidating downtown in 2014, and it now occupies a space at 341 East Benson Boulevard, Suite 2, in the city’s midtown area, after a 2020 move into a storefront roughly double the size of its earlier home. That expansion came with an unplanned delay: the shop closed in February 2020 to prepare the new location, and pandemic restrictions pushed the reopening from an original mid-March target to April 28 of that year, a stretch Brunsting later described as a silver lining that gave her extra time to get the new space right rather than rushing it open.
HoughtonHill’s identity centers on Brunsting’s own jewelry work alongside a broader mix of curated antiques and home decor. Her designs use sterling silver and gold vermeil as a base, set with semi-precious and precious gemstones, freshwater pearls, and natural materials, including fossilized walrus ivory sourced from Alaska itself, a material with genuine regional roots rather than an imported novelty. Every piece is handcrafted and one of a kind, and the shop also offers custom design work, jewelry repair, and appraisals for customers bringing in existing pieces rather than just shopping the cases. That personal, hands-on approach extends to how the shop builds its non-jewelry inventory too: Brunsting has said she physically touches and inspects everything she purchases for the store, a habit that reflects a level of scrutiny not every vintage and consignment shop applies to incoming stock.
The result is an inventory with genuinely wide range, spanning antiques and home decor pieces that run from contemporary consignment finds to items centuries old, with prices reported anywhere from a quarter to twenty-five thousand dollars. That spread means HoughtonHill functions simultaneously as an affordable browsing stop for small trinkets and gifts and as a serious destination for collectors chasing higher-end antique pieces, which is an unusually broad range for a single midtown Anchorage storefront to cover convincingly. The expanded 2020 location gave the shop room to display more of that range at once, rather than rotating a narrower selection in and out of a cramped space.
HoughtonHill is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., making it a convenient stop for midtown Anchorage shoppers running errands along Benson Boulevard, and the shop can be reached directly at 907-770-1301 for questions about current inventory, custom jewelry orders, or appraisal services. Given the handcrafted, locally rooted nature of much of the jewelry, visitors researching gifts with genuine Alaska character, rather than mass-produced souvenirs, tend to find the walrus ivory and gemstone pieces a particular draw.
For anyone in Anchorage looking for antiques, curated home decor, or handcrafted fine jewelry with real Alaska materials behind it, HoughtonHill offers a rare combination: a jewelry designer’s personal workshop and an antique dealer’s curated eye operating out of the same storefront since 2002. In short, HoughtonHill is a longtime Anchorage jewelry and home decor shop where owner Jessica Brunsting’s handcrafted, Alaska-sourced designs sit alongside a wide-ranging, personally vetted selection of antiques and consignment pieces.
