Empty out the trunk first.

Shopping in Greater New Haven is about the eclectic, the obsessed and the unexpected. It’s about running across stores with their own personalities, stores that aren’t anywhere else: the painstaking craft of Fair Haven Furniture, the rambling charm of Whitlock Farm Booksellers in Bethany, the chocolate mice of Marjolaine in New Haven. The Shops at Yale offer an afternoon’s worth of boutiques. The centers of shoreline towns like Milford, Branford, Guilford and Madison are lined with intimate, inimitable storefronts.