Walk down De La Mare Avenue in downtown Fairhope and you will pass a two-story building with a garage door on its face, right next door to one of the most famous independent bookstores in the South. Plenty of people assume it used to be a firehouse. It was not. The garage door exists because a grandmother wanted a convenient place to park, and behind it sits The Lyons Share, the frame shop and gallery that Mike and Kelley Lyons have run for three decades and that regional galleries routinely recommend to anyone with a piece of fine art that deserves a proper frame.
A Coin Flip on the Way to Pensacola
Kelley Lyons grew up in a family already rooted in Eastern Shore retail. In 1965 her grandmother, Betty Joe Wolff, opened Page & Palette in Fairhope, the bookstore that has since passed through multiple generations of the family and become a landmark of downtown. Wolff opened a second location in the Coquina Village shopping center at Perdido Key in 1985, and Kelley worked there. Her identical twin sister, Karin, stepped away from the family business for a while and took a job at the Orange Beach location of Coastal Video.
Mike Lyons grew up in Decatur, in north Alabama, and landed in Gulf Shores after his parents retired to the coast. In the summer of 1987 he and his high school friend and college roommate both took jobs at Coastal Video, Mike at the Gulf Shores store and his roommate at the Orange Beach store alongside Karin. Top Gun had just hit the rental shelves.
One day the roommate called Mike with a proposal. “I met this cute girl at the video store, and she has an identical twin sister. Why don’t we go on a double date?” Kelley remembers it a little differently: “Karin asked me to go to a work party in Pensacola, and I agreed!”
The four met at a Tom Thumb convenience store on the way to that party, and the young men quickly realized a problem worthy of The Parent Trap: they did not know which twin was whose date. Their solution, carried out in full view of the sisters, was to flip a coin on the way out of the store.
The coin chose well, though not immediately. Kelley was seeing a Navy pilot in Pensacola at the time. “I dated them both for a while, but as the summer progressed, I fell in love with Mike,” she said.
From Two Colleges to One, and Into the Frame Business
When summer ended, Mike went back to Auburn and Kelley returned to the University of Montevallo. The separation lasted roughly two weeks. Mike drove to Montevallo, picked Kelley up, and the two moved to Mobile and enrolled at the University of South Alabama so they could be together.
They married in 1990. Kelley took a job as a picture framer at Deck the Walls, a mall store, and about a year later her father, Robbie Wolff, offered her work in his own framing business for 35 cents more an hour. Mike, meanwhile, commuted on weekends from Mobile back to Coastal Video to pay his way through school. “I had no clue what I was going to do, but I did earn a degree in Business at South,” he said. “I knew I wanted to work in retail, work with my hands, and be in a creative environment.”
Kelley managed her father’s framing business for six years. Then, in 1995, Robbie Wolff offered to sell it to the couple. Thirty years later, the business they bought is still theirs.
Hurricane Danny, a Surprise Pregnancy and a Building With a Garage Door
The early years of marriage and ownership were anything but calm. The couple lived in Kelley’s grandmother’s cinder block house on Fish River, one of the slow, winding blackwater streams that drain into Weeks Bay and Mobile Bay in southern Baldwin County. In July 1997, Hurricane Danny crawled across the Alabama coast so slowly that it dumped extraordinary amounts of rain on the area, 30 to 40 inches by the couple’s account, and the Fish River flooded their home.
They moved in with Karin, her husband Kiefer and their new baby on Pier Street in Fairhope, and stayed nearly a year. By then, Kelley said, “we had decided that we weren’t going to have children, and wanted to just travel and live free. Then I found out I was eight weeks pregnant.”
Before the flood, in 1996, the couple had bought the lot beside Page & Palette from Kelley’s grandmother and begun building a commercial space for The Lyons Share, with the shop downstairs and a rental residence upstairs. After the flood and a year of sharing a house, they changed plans and claimed the upstairs apartment for themselves while it was still under construction. “It was a crazy time,” Kelley said.
Betty Joe Wolff had set one condition on the sale: she wanted a convenient parking space. Hence the garage door on the front of the building. “And no, this was never the old firehouse,” Mike said. “We get asked that a lot.”
Daughter Olivia Grace Lyons was born in 1999. Three years later the couple decided to try for one more child and got twins, Ethan and Emily. “If you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans,” Mike said. Today Ethan helps manage The Lyons Share and is the heir apparent, putting the business on track to become another multigenerational family enterprise on the same block.
Finding Artists, Not Just Art
Framing is the foundation of the business, but The Lyons Share has built an equally strong reputation for discovering artists early. Mike and Kelley describe a deliberate approach: they look for painters with a distinctive voice rather than those imitating whatever is selling. At events such as the Loyola art event they attended in Mobile, Mike said, “Most people are there to find art. We are there to find artists.”
Some of the names they mention first:
- Jo Patton, a local artist whose style is recognizable in any medium. “I have to start with a local artist, Jo Patton,” Mike said. Her watercolor “Pier Paintings,” he said, capture the essence of living on Mobile Bay and the backwaters of the low-country Gulf Coast.
- Ann Morley, the late Pensacola folk artist who painted under the name Frantic and whose work is sought by collectors internationally. The shop continues to work with her family and has brokered her pieces as far away as New Zealand. “We are the exclusive Frantic art dealer in the secondary market, and we’re always looking for more,” Mike said.
- Jan Hill, a New Orleans artist with her own distinctive style whose work sells well at the shop.
- Erin Fitzhugh Gregory of Columbus, Georgia, whom the couple recruited while she was a student at Auburn. “You could see the talent. She’s blown up and is huge now. She’s an incredible artist,” Mike said.
Many artists the couple found early have gone on to prestigious galleries in New Orleans, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte and Birmingham. “They’ve grown bigger than Fairhope,” Kelley said. The Lyons Share still carries their work. “It’s nice to be included in such an elite company, and it speaks well for the level of regard for the art community in Fairhope.”
The customer base reflects the region’s growth. Many buyers, Kelley said, are young professionals furnishing larger homes as their families expand. Twenty to 25 percent are tourists, many of them buying art for second homes on the coast. “Discovering and promoting new artists gives us so much pleasure and satisfaction,” she said.
Nall, the Grand Hotel and a Rescue After Katrina
No conversation about Fairhope art goes far without the late artist Nall, the internationally known painter who made the town his home. The couple met him at a fundraiser for The Haven, the no-kill animal shelter in Fairhope, while they were hosting an art show. “He put a $100 bill in the contribution bucket. He knew it was a good project,” Mike said.
That relationship led to one of the shop’s largest jobs. After the Retirement Systems of Alabama, the state pension fund that owns a portfolio of hotels and the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, purchased the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, The Lyons Share framed some 1,700 Nall originals and prints for the property.
The Grand Hotel, which traces its history on Point Clear back to the 1840s, took a hard hit from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Mike recalls being asked to rescue the valuable art collection, which lay piled among debris in the hotel’s conference center. A state trooper guarding the entrance told them flatly, “No one’s getting in here, no one.” A phone call later, the crew was climbing through the wreckage, collecting and salvaging everything they could. “We had to work quickly to dry the art and restore it. They weren’t worried about hotel room table lamps. It was a huge investment that was at risk of being ruined.”
The Art of the Frame
Mike talks about framing the way a musician talks about acoustics. “People don’t always appreciate the frame that goes with art. It’s like a singer walking on the stage of the Apollo Theater. It just makes the music sound better.”
Over the years the shop has handled pieces with extraordinary weight. “We’ve framed some epic stuff. Some of it is haunting,” Mike said, listing a leather document declaring an enslaved person officially free; a pistol given to a Korean War veteran from Pensacola who spent more than seven years in solitary confinement as a prisoner of the Chinese; and a certificate belonging to the second-in-command of the USS Hornet, the carrier that recovered Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins after the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Kelley recalls framing original sheet music from the very first Mardi Gras ball of one of Mobile’s early mystic societies, dating to the 1870s, a link to the city that claims the oldest Carnival celebration in the United States. Mike mentions an original “You Are My Sunshine” composition tied to Jimmie Davis. The shop has also framed paintings that hang in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, Norman Rockwell originals and a Picasso. “Some of it’s magical. I often feel inadequate,” Mike said. He regularly reminds employees that everything they touch might as well be worth a million dollars.
Not every job is solemn. The couple laugh about what they call “The Wall of Shame”: family photos brought in for reframing after a former in-law has been cut out. “There’s a reason the in-laws are always at the end of family group photos,” Mike said. “We refer to it as the art of framing. Your frame is as important as the art itself.”
Community Roots in a Growing Town
Fairhope was founded in 1894 as a single-tax colony by followers of economist Henry George, and it has long attracted artists, writers and free thinkers. The town’s arts identity is visible in the monthly First Friday Art Walk, the annual Arts & Crafts Festival each March and the galleries that line its downtown streets. The Lyons Share is a fixture of that scene, hosting a featured artist exhibit every First Friday.
Kelley describes her grandmother, Betty Joe Wolff, as part of a generation of strong Southern matriarchs who left an indelible mark on their communities; Wolff was best friends with author Fannie Flagg. The couple have carried that spirit forward. Mike started the Sunset Rotary Club with the help of friends and created the Fairhope Steak Cook-off fundraiser with Charlie Baumhower. “They’ve cleared over a million dollars for local charities,” Kelley said proudly.
On September 5, 2025, the shop hosted “Six Architects: In Celebration of 50 Years of Friendship,” a gathering of artists who came together to share insights from lifetimes of creative work.
Asked about Fairhope’s rapid growth, Mike offered both welcome and a request. “We understand why people want to live here. I hope they will take the time to learn about our history and what makes this area special.” As for the business, he said, “We try to stay relevant and keep our feet in the pool.”
Visiting The Lyons Share
For readers who want to see the shop for themselves, a few tips:
- The Lyons Share sits on De La Mare Avenue in downtown Fairhope, next door to Page & Palette and a short walk from Fairhope Avenue and Section Street.
- First Friday Art Walk, held on the first Friday evening of each month, is the best time to see a featured artist exhibit and meet other gallery-goers.
- If you are bringing in a piece to be framed, especially a document, photograph or work on paper with sentimental or monetary value, ask about conservation-grade materials and UV-protective glazing.
- Downtown parking fills up quickly on Art Walk nights; arriving early and walking between stops is the easiest approach.
Thirty years after buying her father’s framing business, and nearly four decades after a coin flip outside a convenience store, Kelley and Mike Lyons are still doing what they set out to do: working with their hands, surrounded by art, in a town that keeps discovering why it loves both.