In Business of Home’s series Shop Talk, we chat with owners of home furnishings stores across the country to hear about their hard-won lessons and challenges, big and small. This week, we spoke with Ann Huff and Meg Harrington of the Atlanta- and Paris-based Huff Harrington stores.
When friends Huff and Harrington first met nearly 20 years ago, they were both selling art out of their homes in Atlanta. In 2006, they launched their business as a retail gallery, specializing in art by French and Southern artists. The company’s offerings have steadily increased in reaction to the market: During the 2008 recession, they began organizing curated shopping trips around France. In 2011, they opened a home furnishings store. Soon after, they started providing interior-design services, and with the pandemic boom, three years ago they extended their services to Paris, and back home in Atlanta they consolidated their businesses under one roof.
Though Huff now resides in Paris and Harrington in Atlanta, their connection couldn’t be clearer, as they maintain a rapport akin to the Abbott and Costello of French antiques. On a call across time zones with Business of Home, the partners called each other by the pet name Madame while discussing the mania of European flea markets and why Huff and Harrington customers are American, no matter which side of the ocean they’re shopping.
How did you two meet and begin your partnership?
Meg Harrington: It all begins with a love of France. I was mouthing off to friends that I wanted to go to France and bring my children and stay for three weeks and have a fabulous time. Somebody said, “Oh, you need to meet Ann Huff. She has this house in France, but she also sells art out of her home.” I was like, “Who is this Ann Huff?” So I snuck into one of her art shows and introduced myself. I was intrigued by the art that she was selling. I was also selling art out of my home, but unlike Ann, my artists were local—Atlanta or Southeastern artists—and Ann’s were all French. One day, a few months later, we said, “Hey, let’s go have lunch.” We went to this little French restaurant here in Atlanta called Anis, and the rumor is that there was a full bottle of red wine consumed—
Ann Huff: Not true!
Harrington: Maybe not. But at the end of the bottle of wine, we were shaking hands. We had decided to open a retail art gallery.
Huff: Having people in our homes and having walls that looked like Swiss cheese from all the nail holes, we both realized we didn’t like doing it anymore. And actually, I think it was kind of illegal, right?
Harrington: Oh, yeah. It was totally illegal. We couldn’t market it. We were relying on private-school directories for our clients. We both went home that evening and told our husbands, “Hey, I just went into business.”
“You did what?”
“I went into business.”
“With whom?”
“Ann Huff.”
“Who’s Ann Huff?”
That was in the summer of 2005, and now we’re like an old married couple.
Will you describe the two spaces?
Harrington: Here in Atlanta, we have an 8,500-square-foot building that houses Huff Harrington Home, Huff Harrington Fine Art, and Huff Harrington Design.
Huff: [In Paris], we house all of the above in 40 square feet. We’re also renting a space behind us that houses our design studio.
How does the merchandising work across the two spaces? Are most things going toward Atlanta?
Harrington: The merchandise mix in Atlanta is the heart of the business. It’s what makes us tick. We love the juxtaposition of things that are very old and crusty mixed with things that are very new and sleek. The yin and the yang. So if you walk into the Atlanta store, I like to say it’s a snapshot of who we are. There are antiques married with abstract art. There are old workbenches from the early 1900s with very sculptural lamps on them. The staircase here has a leopard runner running up all three stories. The art gallery is full of light, and the walls are chockablock with a mix of styles. The thing about Paris—and Madame, pipe in on this—when you walk in, you’re like, “Oh, this is totally Huff Harrington.” It is the same thing, just shrunk down.
Huff: It definitely is. This was part of the strategy of opening in Paris: We do a lot of design work here. So a lot of the things that we buy could go into one of our design projects, and usually do. But if it doesn’t, and it doesn’t sell in the retail space, we know it could sell in the U.S., so it just hops onto the next container. Most of our clients in France are American, so that’s the beauty of it.
Yes, who are your typical customers? How much of it is the trade, tourists, walk-ins?
Huff: We don’t get a ton of walk-ins [in Paris]. The French don’t really like us. They walk in, look at [the products] and go, “Oh, my grandmother had that. But that’s pretty cool, the way you put it with a modern painting. Gee, I might have to try that.” And then they walk out again. But Americans love to shop with us, and if anything, it puts us back on the map for them in the U.S. Really, 95 percent of our sales in France are to our existing design clients. We do sell quite a bit of art to people coming through Paris, but mostly to Americans or Anglophiles.
How do Americans find you? And what makes the store so unappealing to the French?
Huff: We’re in the 7th arrondissement, which is pretty American—the American Church is here, The American Library, The American University. There are a lot of Americans at the Eiffel Tower. So there are a lot of Americans who just happen to walk by and see it and are drawn to it. The fact that when they walk in, they’re greeted by this lovely American from Birmingham, Alabama, helps the story.
With the French, they’re real purists. They would want to show antiques with antiques and only with antiques, and we’re all about the mix, as Meg was saying. So they walk in and they’re a bit surprised. The French have inherited most of those [types of] antiques, so they’re not really interested in buying what we have to sell. But when they see it mixed, they’re intrigued.
Tell me about your merchandising process. How much do you guys hunt together?
Harrington: For domestic merchandise, we’re lucky that AmericasMart is literally 15 minutes away. There are so many great lines represented there. We shop at High Point. One thing we’re working on is trying to identify more niche manufacturers or producers who make smaller batches of things.
Then of course, I’m so lucky I get to visit France a lot. In fact, it’s not part of our partners agreement, but I have a [personal] stipulation where I have to keep my [frequent-flier] status on Delta, which means I have to go at least six or seven times a year. Ann and I have it down to quite the science. We have a circuit of professional antique fairs.
Huff: What we’ve learned about working with the French is that it’s very much about the relationships. So we go back to the same places a lot, because we have good relationships with vendors, and trust builds up. Some people will say, “Well, do you bargain? How do you get the best prices?” It’s not about that. It’s about having a great relationship and getting the story behind the product, and then conveying that story back in the U.S., which always helps to sell something. We go to wholesale fairs around France. We shop a little bit in Italy and in Belgium, but we really have good luck in France.
Harrington: We’ve worked hard on those relationships. We’re at the point now that a week or two before the fairs start, we’ll get inundated with WhatsApps or texts from our vendors saying, “Are you coming? What are you looking for? I’ll hold it for you until you can come see it.”
Huff: The last time we were in France together, after about four days we realized we’d never bought our own lunch, because some vendor would come up and say, “By the way, I just paid for your lunch.”
Harrington: Yeah, it’s great. And if you haven’t been to a professional flea or a professional antiques fair, it is the most bizarre thing. The gates are shut, there are armed guards, everybody’s smoking cigarettes and downing their espressos, all smushed in together. The Americans are like, “Hey, hi! Woohoo! Ciao!” Then all of a sudden, at eight o’clock, they open the gates. We’ve been carried away on the crowd. Swept away! It’s so much fun.
You clearly have a shorthand with each other, but when you’re shopping together are there ways you can let each other know you found something?
Huff: We agree on about 85 percent, which is great, because that 15 percent is always kind of fun. Meg tends to be too enthusiastic.
Harrington: For sure.
Huff: I’m like, “Meg, slow down. If you come running here, he’s going to know you want to buy it!”
Harrington: I’m fine. It’s fine!
Huff: Well, I don’t want to make fun of Meg, because your French is really good. But I will say, you overpaid for something big-time recently.
Harrington: I was off by about 400 euros. I’m surprised Ann didn’t fire me that day. It’s terrible.
Huff: We respect each other, and we have thick skin, so we don’t get upset if one of us says, “No, I don’t like that.” We move on. We’re lucky we have that relationship.
Tell me about these shopping trips you take with customers.
Huff: We started this [initiative] a few years ago because it occurred to us that we knew our stuff and we like sharing. It’s funny because people will say, “Aren’t you going to lose that customer? They’re not going to buy!” We’ve had so many people who come on our trips who end up being our best customers in the store because they’ve seen it. They understand the business and they appreciate it; they’ve lived through it.
We don’t take them to the wholesale fairs because that would be too crazy. We don’t think that’s fair to our other wholesalers, and we’re clear about this. We take them to some really good, off-the-beaten-path fairs, but we leave the wholesale fairs for the true professionals in our business.
Harrington: One of the benefits of the buying trips is that it’s actually a very logistical, layered experience and process. You find a piece, you put a little paper on it, move some paperwork around, and then three months later it ends up in Atlanta. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can get messy quickly. So [the appeal is that we] take care of all the logistics on these trips.
Huff: Recently we started adding another trip for designers only, which Meg and I love because they make decisions so fast. One of the benefits for us is that we get to see what they’re buying. Sometimes that opens our eyes to things that we may be missing that we need to buy. And then of course, all together we offset the price of containers, so they’re shipping much cheaper than they would be on their own. I don’t want to brag about it too much because I think that we have a little niche doing it, but it’s good.
Is there an element of education when you’re going with non-trade folks?
Huff: A lot of it is [about that]. We love telling people how to deal with the French [laughs]. Yeah, sorry, that came out wrong. How to recognize Louis XVI versus Louis XV, 18th century versus 17th century. We’ve been doing it for years, so it’s fun for us to be able to educate. I think that’s a big component—don’t you, Meg?
Harrington: Absolutely. Plus the vendors that we see with clients are true experts. They are specialized in whatever niche they have, and they can talk for hours. It’s like a little window into history.
What are each of your favorite categories or types of objects to find?
Harrington: I can’t pick a favorite child here. I do love the antiques. I love finding something that has been used a lot, well-loved. But then I’m also a sucker for the art. We represent close to 60 artists at this point. The art has always had my heart.
Huff: I like buying something and knowing it’s going to be fabulous but not knowing how it’s going to end up in the store, then having our merchandisers pull it together with something completely unexpected. That, to me, is tremendous joy. It’s all about the vignettes, so it’s not one individual thing—it’s how they all play together.
We talked about what the Paris neighborhood is like. Where does the Atlanta store fit within the city’s design scene?
Harrington: In 2021, we packed up where we had been, in Buckhead, a residential and commercial area north of downtown Atlanta. We had two separate locations for many years: a little cottage for the gallery, and up the street was our 4,000-square-foot home store with furnishings and antiques. Right as we were coming out of Covid, we were very fortunate to find a new location, at The Galleries of Peachtree Hills, another little neighborhood in Buckhead. We are literally right next door to ADAC.
The Galleries is a pretty little commercial neighborhood of like-minded businesses, so there are several art galleries, high-end antiques and furniture stores, and interior designers. This place we purchased has three floors, 8,500 square feet, so now we are all housed in one space together, which is great not only for us as a company but for our clients. It’s much more convenient for them. It was an intentional shift in our business plan; we knew we would probably lose a percentage of our retail/gift clients because of the location, but we’ve been replacing that client with interior designers, which has always been our ulterior motive.
How do you balance the retail with design services, across time zones and all these other logistical difficulties?
Harrington: Let me talk about Atlanta first. We are selling to designers, but we also have our own interior design services, which is nicely busy right now. It’s housed on the third floor of our store, and it’s wonderful having our designers in-house because they are so good. They’re so talented, and they’re excellent at merchandising, which I am not.
Huff: The Paris situation is different because most of our revenue in Paris is about interior design, working with Americans and foreigners to create the dream apartment they’ve always wanted [abroad]. We’re on the ground here, and we can do everything from help them find the apartment with some of our partners, to renovate them completely, to furnish them. All they need to bring is their toothbrush, and they can move right in. I’ll be perfectly honest—the retail store was almost like a storage unit initially, and then we decided that we could make it look nice, and we had a nice little location. So it’s kind of the tail wagging the dog in terms of retail. But it works!
How do you maintain peace between the two of you and stay focused on what you want from the business? How do you make it work between these two places?
Huff: Well, my happiest moment is when I wake up in the morning and I have my coffee and look at the numbers from Atlanta the night before. So I have a real pulse on the American business. We have such a good relationship that at any time, if there’s a sort of a panic moment, we just text each other and get on the phone. We typically have two or three scheduled calls every week just to talk, then we also have several calls with our joint vendors or consultants—our marketing people, financial people, merchandise people. We don’t have any problem communicating.
Harrington: I think it was a gutsy move for Ann to raise her hand to do this, especially with the timing [post-pandemic]. I think Ann had a little trepidation about that, because we knew it was going to be a long and red-tape-filled experience. I don’t know if I’ve really ever verbalized this to you, Madame!
What are each of your best days at work?
Harrington: That glass of rosé [at the end of a long day] after getting up at five in the morning, that’s pretty fabulous. But no, I had this day yesterday: We just received a container here in Atlanta, and we’ve been bustling around, moving things. We had a lot of customers and clients in the store. Things are walking in and out the door. I just love that energy. Of course, I get such validation when I can overhear what our clients are saying about the merchandise or the store. I had a great day.
Huff: I think our best days are when our clients arrive for the first time, and they cry when they walk into the apartment that they’ve never seen before.
Harrington: Tears of joy!
Huff: To be rewarded in that way, with their happiness, is just gigantic. Also, we’ve been building a little team here of really good people, and my happiness is to see them get along. They’re having drinks right now, four of them together! I love that—that we’re getting the same kind of camaraderie going here in Paris and with each other.
