Carmen Brock’s Charles Village Home is a Treasured Trove
by Janelle Erlichman Diamond
Published August 31 in Baltimore Magazine
Excerpt: Carmen Brock and her house felt like strangers in the summer of 2020. Brock, the beloved owner of home goods shop Trohv, had spend the past 14 years living and breathing her store on the Avenue, which often meant ignoring her Victorian-style rowhome on Guilford Avenue, in the heart of Charles Village. It was merely a place to rest her weary head.
When, due to the weight of the pandemic, Trohv closed for good in August 2020, suddenly Brock, who was a Baltimore City middle school teacher before opening Trohv, found herself only being at home. And a reintroduction began.
“It really was a refuge—with the shop and even when I was teaching, I just wasn’t here that much,” she says.
But when Brock found herself unmoored, it was her home that she craved.
“I’m truly head over heels for the comfort that your own space can bring you,” she says. “It’s not just comfort, it’s also a place where I was experiencing loneliness and heartbreak. A safe, tender place where I could mourn Trohv. It felt like it held me.”