Doff your chapeau to the
itty-bitty St. Evans Hattery.

St. Evans Hattery, Victoria
Jeffrey Bosdet/YAM Magazine

When it comes to stylish hats, Chris Stevens has got you covered. She’s the owner and hatmaker at St. Evans Hattery, located at 569 Johnson Street, Unit A, in what might just be the world’s tiniest store.

All her chapeaux are variations on the fedora, crafted from fur felt and custom-made for the person who plans to wear it. “People’s heads vary very, very widely,” she says. “North Americans tend to have avocado-shaped heads — depending on your lineage, you can have a different shaped head. Looking at people’s head shapes, it’s crazy how different they are.”

She adds: “I personally do a lot of asymmetrical shapes; that’s what I’m drawn to. If you make a hat asymmetrical, it makes the person under it look more symmetrical, which is what we find pleasing.”

Stevens came to hat-making about six years ago, after a career in tailoring. She was craving a more immediate sense of creative satisfaction than she was getting from making suits, which take about 180 hours to complete. She was also looking for a hat that would fit her “unusually small head.”

She found herself making more hats than she could ever wear, so she began selling them at farmers’ markets. Sales were so brisk, despite a price tag that can range from $350 to $1,500, that she quickly realized she’d need a store. Just not a very big one.

A “friend of a friend” found the four-by-10-foot space on Johnson Street; two weeks later, at the end of May, she moved in. She carries no inventory aside from a few samples, and makes her hats right on the premises.

But is it really the world’s tiniest store? “As far as I can tell, it’s definitely the smallest hattery, and searching Google, the smallest store I can find was 50 square feet in New York,” she says. St. Evans, by contrast, is a petite 40 square feet. But Stevens doesn’t mind. “The space works quite well for me.”