Lifestyle brand Hill House Home has opened a fourth location, in Charleston, S.C., featuring Nell’s, a food and beverage concept featuring an old-school coffee and soda bar with a Pick ‘n’ Mix candy wall.
The shop, which will carry Hill House Home’s fashion and home collections, is the first Hill House Home store that will have Nell’s. Spanning 3,500 square feet, the Charleston store also marks Hill House Home’s largest location to date and is three times the size of its other store locations. Its other stores are in New York, Palm Beach, Fla., and a season store in Nantucket, Mass.
The new shop at 145 King Street was designed by Amanda Lindroth, who also designed Hill House Home’s Palm Beach store.
“It’s always been really important to me to create these in-store shopping experiences that feel fun,” said Nell Diamond, founder and chief executive officer of Hill House Home. “Now more than ever, businesses have a responsibility to offer a different experience in-store than they do online.”
While she said it’s easy to shop online and the shipping is fast, the in-store experience needed to offer more.
“I always wanted to see what extra step we could take to make it [the in-store experience] really worth it for our customers to actually come into the store. From our very first store, I was always dreaming of this idea to have this food and beverage tied to it,” Diamond said.
Diamond said the Charleston location was the first opportunity to have the space to accommodate a food and beverage concept as well as the product they sell each day.
It is designed as a little coffee shop where customers can sit at tables and enjoy drinks and treats, and there’s an upholstered couch that’s a bench. They are offering a range of hot and cold drinks in partnership with Coca-Cola and La Colombe, and the café offers snacks and Wi-Fi. There’s also Pick ‘n’ Mix candy featuring 25 varieties of candy.
“I grew up in the U.K. in London, and Pick ‘n’ Mix candy is a huge part of my childhood. There used to be shovels to put candy in a bag. We actually imported some of my favorite British candies to be in the store,” she said. “You can come in, you can get your coffee, you can get a fountain soda, it was really important to me to have Diet Coke from a fountain, you can get tea and all sorts of fun drinks. Then you can come over and do the Pick ‘n’ Mix section,” she said. The bag has some of the brand’s prints on them.
Asked if she plans to open more Nell’s around the U.S., Diamond said, “If this one works, we would love to. It just felt like an awesome opportunity to share more of our creative side with our community and to bring some sweet treats to the shopping experience.”
Asked why she chose Charleston for her fourth location, Diamond said, “I’ve always loved Charleston. I’ve visited it quite a few times. It’s such an incredible town with so much beautiful architecture and history. Quite a few of our customers, even if they didn’t live in Charleston, were traveling to Charleston at least once a year. Our customers tell us it’s a favorite destination of theirs. We’re also in two other resort towns, Nantucket Island and Palm Beach, and both of those stores do really well for us. Charleston felt like a natural next step for us when we were presented with an opportunity to take our lease.”
In the fall, Diamond said they plan to open another Hill House Home store in Dallas, but it won’t have a Nell’s. Diamond said she intends to try out the food and beverage concept in Charleston and see how it goes.
Addressing current retail business, Diamond said, “It’s great. We’ve had such an amazing experience building this very loyal community that calls itself ‘Nap Dress Nation.’ They’ve been so supportive of the brand as we expand and build, so it’s really been a fun couple of years building the business.”
The Nap Dress is the cult-favorite piece that experienced explosive growth and put the brand on the fashion map. Despite the garment’s name, the Nap Dress isn’t specifically intended for sleep, but is meant as a comfortable option to take the wearer through their day.
Since launching online in 2016 with bedding, Hill House Home has quickly expanded into ready-to-wear, accessories, childrenswear, shoes and outerwear.
Hill House Home just started wholesaling its collection, and Shopbop and Saks are the company’s two biggest accounts. They also sell their kids’ clothing at Maisonette and sell bridal looks at Over the Moon.
Describing the Charlotte store, Diamond said, “We really wanted it to almost mirror an apartment. The Nell’s section is almost like your kitchen.” There also is a little section that has a bed in it to showcase some of the bedding and a closet area is the dressing rooms. “It feels really homey and fun. So much of what we do is rooted in the home,” Diamond said. “We use primarily residential decorators to do our stores. And making them feel as homey as possible.”
In the Charleston store, 80 percent is fashion and 20 is home, which mimics the overall business. “We also have a nice kids’ business,” she said.
Diamond said they’re focused on the categories that they’re in right now. Within fashion, swim has been very successful, as well as fashion overall. The company launched wallpaper a few months ago (wallpaper, fabric and throw pillows). “Everything we do is very print forward. We try to apply prints across the different categories. Our bedding is our best seller in our home department, and is one of my favorite things I make. I’m excited to show that in our Charleston store. None of our other stores have any bedding on display,” she said.
Diamond expects dresses to be bestsellers at the Charleston store and one of their bestsellers now is the Matilda dress, which features a fitted Empire waist and flares into a full skirt with a lot of movement. “That does very well and we’ll have quite a few of those available,” she said.
Asked where else she wants to open new stores, Diamond said, “We’re eagerly looking but nothing is confirmed yet. Both Charleston and Dallas have been in the works for a long time. We put a lot of time into the design of both of them. Both of those geographic regions, we have have a ton of customers, so we’re so excited to meet them in person and have them try on our product. So many people over the past few years have discovered Hill House through fashion and our Nap Dress. So stores really allow us the opportunity to introduce them to everything we do, which is so vast.”
Hill House has no other distribution in Charleston. “What we found in our existing stores that have been open, we’re averaging 70 percent new customers. Stores are also a really amazing way to be meet new customers and introduce them to the brand,” she said.
