Turn down Laurel Lane behind the AmeriCU building on Oswego Road in Liverpool and a converted gambrel-roofed barn comes into view, home to Inspired, a home decor and vintage furnishings shop built almost entirely from one owner’s decades-long detour through sewing, retail, design, and salvage. Judi Burrows, who describes herself as the shop’s shopkeeper, furniture rescuer, designer, and curator, traces her path here back to childhood, when parents shaped by the Great Depression and World War Two instilled a habit of valuing old and forlorn objects rather than discarding them. She learned to sew at age seven, worked a high school job in a hardware department that sparked a comfort with power tools, earned a college degree in fashion design and retail merchandising, spent years in retail management, sold pieces through local craft shows while raising a family, and ran an Etsy shop before collaborating with a local builder and interior designer on the Parade of Homes between 2012 and 2014. When her husband bought the barn property that now houses the shop, those threads finally converged into Inspired.
Inside, the inventory blends vintage finds with home decor and custom, hand-painted furniture, styled across a mix of design languages that includes urban farmhouse, cottage, French country, mid-century, and industrial looks, all playing off the barn’s own gambrel-style architecture. Shoppers can expect candles, pillows, faux greenery, wall art, vintage ironstone, coastal-themed pieces, architectural salvage, and furniture reworked with Fusion Mineral Paint, for which the shop is an official stockist. Inspired keeps a seasonal, appointment-forward schedule: Thursday through Saturday it is open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. from late January through late December, while Tuesday and Wednesday are reserved for private appointments, and the shop is closed Sunday and Monday. Groups are welcome to book private shopping sessions, and curbside pickup is available for online orders, a flexibility that suits both spontaneous drop-in browsers and shoppers planning ahead.
What separates Inspired from a typical vintage storefront is the barn setting itself, paired with Burrows’s hands-on approach to merchandising. Rather than simply reselling found pieces, the shop builds vignettes meant to demonstrate how to mix antiques into a modern room, and staff offer informal interior design advice alongside custom furniture commissions for customers who want a specific piece painted or reworked to match their own space. That combination of retail and design consultation has earned the shop a strong local following, with a 5-star rating across more than twenty Facebook reviews and nearly 3,000 followers keeping up with new arrivals. A large free parking lot out front makes it an easy stop for anyone touring the Liverpool and greater Syracuse area for vintage and home decor finds, and the shop’s ever-changing inventory means the vignettes on display rarely look the same from one visit to the next. Inspired is a barn-housed vintage home decor and custom furniture shop in Liverpool, New York, built by owner Judi Burrows around a lifelong love of repurposing old and forlorn pieces into fresh, livable design.
