Business & Tech

The French Apartment Closes After Nearly Five Years; Points To Change

A telling sign of a shift in how Georgetowners shop, the owner says.

The French Apartment, nestled on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown's Book Hill retail cluster, closed its doors on Sunday after nearly five years of business.

It's next-door neighbor, Heiner Contemporary, also closed the first week of January. 

Owner Kathleen McGarrah, who has spent her time as a shop owner curating both vintage and modern furniture and accessories reminiscent of Hollywood Glamour, said her shop had gotten real quiet in the past couple years. 

The furniture business just doesn't have a storefront face anymore, McGarrah said. 

"The whole street used to be furniture stores," she said. "This is old school. This is Georgetown 50 years ago."

Most of the new residents in Georgetown order furniture online, at Ikea, or want to be able to order multiples of an item, McGarrah said. And the small, independent Georgetown shops are suffering. 

"It's not that technology happened over night, but it takes a while for it to reach critical mass," she said. 

The street has slowly changed over from a furniture hub to an art district and is once more transitioning but this time into service industries, she said pointing to the massage studio and restaurants that now call the Book Hill area home. 

"Everybody is trying to rework their business," she said.

During her five years as the owner of The French Apartment, McGarrah has made trips out to Shenandoah, Baltimore and the "middle of nowhere," to find one-of-a-kind pieces for the shop, McGarrah said. 

"A lot of people come in and want 100 of them," she said. 

The process is time consuming, expensive and can't be mass produced, McGarrah said.

"People don't shop this way anymore," she said. 

McGarrah plans to have some sort of presence again in the future. Maybe online, she said. But the shop won't be coming back.

"The customer is gone, and the customer isn't coming back," she said. 

Although, McGarrah would like to see business pick up again for mom-and-pop Georgetown as a whole, she said that her store closing was just something that needed to happen.

"I made peace with it," she said. "I realized that all through history technology changes."

McGarrah is toying with the idea of heading to Southern California to work with set design. 

But as a Georgetown resident, McGarrah loves the character of the small businesses and is concerned with the neighborhood's shift toward large chain retailers on M Street. From the hustle and bustle around the chain stores, it is hard to attract shoppers up the hill to the independent shops, she said.

The Georgetown BID had promised more signage and other retailers are looking for solutions like putting on more French Markets throughout the year, but finding a strategy is not simple, McGarrah said. 

"I think the neighborhood looks at a pretty block and can't imagine something is wrong behind the storefronts," McGarrah said. "But it's very quiet up here." 

 What would you like to see happen to Book Hill? Save the arts or bring on the restaurants? 


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