Good Neighbor’s Shawn Chopra Uses His Creative Powers for Good

Despite the early hour and wet September morning, it’s standing room only at Creative Mornings, a monthly breakfast lecture series for local creatives. Shawn Chopra, the creative director and owner of coffee and home goods store Good Neighbor, is the featured speaker and even thought he looks like the coolest person at the party, he seems nervous.

But once Chopra starts talking about “shedding a lifetime of going through the motions,” his voice gets steadier and easily fills the room at Sandtown Furniture in Pigtown. Chopra ends the talk by handing out pieces of papyrus, a thick paper that was used in ancient times. For Chopra, papyrus has come to represent the connection between roots and growth.

Chopra’s parents grew up in Chandigarh, India, the dream city of India’s first prime minister, Sh. Jawaharlal Nehru, and planned by the famous French architect Le Corbusier. It’s known as one of the best experiments in urban planning and modern architecture in the 20th century. But Chopra himself was born in Winnipeg—“the cold middle part of Canada,” he sighs—after his parents immigrated there in 1985.

The family then moved to Vancouver, where Chopra spent his childhood in a city called Richmond. Due to an influx of Indian and Chinese immigrants and a shortage of housing, Chopra’s father, who worked as an engineer and provided the sole income for the family, saw an opportunity to renovate and flip their small childhood home.

Every few years when the market was right, they would rinse and repeat. “I think my dad enjoyed it,” says Chopra. “And I think we as a family enjoyed the renovation process.” Chopra’s parents were also homebodies and much preferred hosting friends at their house to going out. That meant Chopra spent a lot of time in his room, which he filled with sports team pennants his father would pick up on his business trips to the United States.

“I would also constantly rearrange the furniture in my room,” remembers Chopra. “We used to go thrifting—a lot of my clothes were thrifted and also my furniture, like side tables and lamps.”

The cornerstones of his childhood—hospitality, innovation, renovation—ended up being the building blocks that ultimately led to opening Good Neighbor.

By the time his senior year of high school rolled around, Chopra had his eyes set on New York, so he did the most sensible thing he could think of and headed to the “East Coast of Canada”—Ottawa. His parents had hinted he had three career options in their eyes—health care, lawyer, or accountant—so he found himself studying physical therapy at the University of Ottawa.

It was on his first day of college that he met Anne Morgan, herself the child of Egyptian immigrants. They started dating in 2007. Morgan immediately recognized that he was a creative spirit.

“She was able to uncover a lot of these things in my past,” says Chopra, and she would press him: “What are you doing studying medicine?” But at the same time, she understood the immigrant mentality of being expected to do something great. “Meeting Anne was one of the best things that happened to me, because she saw me,” says Chopra.

The two graduated in 2009 and two years later they moved to Baltimore, where Morgan was enrolled in dental school at the University of Maryland.

“We’ll live in Baltimore for four years,” Chopra remembers thinking as they purchased an apartment in Locust Point. (Living in Baltimore also meant he was now only a train ride away from New York City.) Chopra transferred his physical therapy license, but wanted to make a bigger impact in the field, so he began working in public health and visiting seniors around the city who were in recovery from strokes and other ailments.

“I loved it,” says Chopra. “I got to go to every part of Baltimore.” And suddenly a Canadian was visiting neighborhoods that even some homegrowns had never been to—talking to residents and their children, who would occasionally stop by and share stories.

“That’s where I started to fall in love with the city,” says Chopra. “It just needs more people to stay and do something and be a part of it.”

Baltimore is addicting because it’s the kind of place where people believe in your dream, he says. “I think Charm City is the right word for it because it is very charming, and I think people see the potential in it,” he says. “It’s authentic.”

Chopra had also gotten to know a lot of the artists and makers and became immersed in how they created the fabric of the city—but at that point simply as a supportive bystander. Then one day it hit him.

“I was tired of consuming other people’s work,” he says. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate their art; it’s just that he wanted to create, too. He was finally owning up to what Morgan had been telling him all along—there was a piece of him missing and he realized he would actually be honoring his parents by becoming the best version of himself.

So, he decided it was time for a leap of faith. But he still didn’t know exactly what that meant. Should he go back to school? How could he be more involved in the community?

“And then I just came up with the idea of Good Neighbor,” he says. “A place that I thought Baltimore needed, a place that I needed.”

Chopra made a list of all the things that he and Morgan enjoyed—coffee, community, togetherness, sharing meals, beautiful dishware, plants. He decided he would make it a one-stop cool coffee shop where lingering is encouraged.

“You know, you go to these other cities and it’s like, ‘Why can’t Baltimore have this?’” he says. Yeah, it would be that.

He rented the space in 2019. It had been sitting empty for a few years and needed a complete rehaul. Chopra had never worked as a contractor but had helped his father on all those home renovations, so he was able to self-manage the build-out.

“It was the only way we could afford this,” says Chopra. But in the end, it was also “the only way I wanted to do it. This was going be my education this was my grad school,” he says. “That’s actually how my parents framed it.”

Chopra and his builders got to work, with an initial opening date of March 2020. Obviously, the pandemic had other plans and they spent the extra two months adjusting—building an outdoor deck and changing business procedures.

In May of 2020, still in the throes of COVID and with Morgan nine months pregnant, Good Neighbor opened on Falls Road between Hampden and Hoes Heights. It’s a rare space, with a main building, a big outdoor area, and a garage that was turned into a picture-perfect greenhouse and has probably starred in hundreds of Instagram stories.

Even with all that, Chopra wasn’t sure if it would work. Having customers wear masks and socially distance to keep the employees safe made no sense when the whole purpose of Good Neighbor was stranger interaction and closeness. But people came. They utilized the tiered outdoor garden and still felt like they were hanging out with other friends even if they couldn’t sit together.

“It was a dizzying couple of years,” says Chopra. And when customers finally could come inside, they found a light-filled space stocked with Chopra’s curated finds, from furniture to housewares, bottles of wine, magazines, and candles.

In 2023, Chopra launched Guesthouse by Good Neighbor, a seven-room boutique hotel on the two floors above the coffee and retail space, which had previously been used as storage. Meant to recreate the feeling of staying at a friend’s house versus a stuffy hotel, it doubles, like the shop, as an opportunity to showcase the work of Baltimore makers and artists as well as Chopra’s and Morgan’s roots.

In November of 2022, Chopra, Morgan, and their toddler son, Avi, visited Aswan, Egypt, with Chopra’s “baba” (Egyptian for father-in-law), who helped them source more than 2,000 pieces of papyrus that have since been integrated into every room at the hotel. Often, the light hits and dances off the ancient paper as it takes on new life within the most modern spaces.

And while Charm City now gets to claim Chopra as its own, he has also been noticed by the bigger design community, from furniture brands that had never had accounts in Baltimore before to national design magazines. “Baltimore’s Tight-Knit Design Scene Is Thriving,” announces a new piece in Dwell magazine, with an illustration of Chopra and a story proclaiming him as “the city’s beloved design retail resource.”

Locally, the design community has taken note as well. “Shawn has done such a brilliant job of bringing incredible design and a high-end aesthetic to Baltimore in a way that is approachable and for the people,” says Robin Heller, lead designer and founder of Surrounded By Color. “He’s so open to ideas and input from designers and brands and friends and patrons. It’s refreshing.”

Part of Chopra’s genius is also the relationship between his businesses. The success and aesthetic of Good Neighbor led to Guesthouse, which in turn has led to Design Garage, a space for designers, architects, builders, and decorators to work together and innovate, and even a weeklong Good Neighbor Design Camp.

Chopra’s parents still live in Vancouver but come down several times a year—mostly to see their grandson Avi—and “they do love the shop and seeing me in my element and using my talents,” says Chopra. He knows they worried, as parents do, when he took that huge gamble on his future.

“But, as I always tell them, the immigrant sacrifice they made was so that their kids could dream completely free and without constraints, something they could not afford to do.”

That there is now tangible evidence of his success feels good.

“Shawn and his team have imagined Baltimore in a super aesthetically pleasing way,” says Surrounded By Color’s Heller. “It’s so lovely as a designer, and a Baltimorean, to be able to bask in the light of it all and watch everyone else shine in it too.”