Lifestyle brand Hill House Home has opened a fourth location in Charleston, SC, with Nell’s, a food and beverage concept featuring an old-fashioned coffee and soda bar with a Pick ‘n’ Mix candy wall.
The store, which will sell Hill House Home’s fashion and home collections, is the first Hill House Home store Nell’s will have. Spanning 3,500 square feet, the Charleston store is also Hill House Home’s largest location to date and is three times the size of its other store locations. The other stores are in New York, Palm Beach, Florida, and a seasonal store in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
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The new store at 145 King Street was designed by Amanda Lindroth, who also designed Hill House Home’s Palm Beach store.
“It has always been very important to me to create shopping experiences that are fun,” said Nell Diamond, founder and CEO of Hill House Home. “Now more than ever, companies have a responsibility to provide a different experience in-store than online.”
While she said it’s easy to shop online and 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 to the store. From our very first store, I always dreamed of this idea of pairing this food and drink with it,” Diamond said.
Diamond said the Charleston location was the first opportunity to accommodate a food and beverage concept and the product they sell every day.
It is designed as a small coffee shop where customers can sit at tables and enjoy drinks and treats, and there is an upholstered bench that doubles as a sofa. In partnership with Coca-Cola and La Colombe, they offer a range of hot and cold drinks, and the café offers snacks and WiFi. There is also Pick ‘n’ Mix sweets with 25 types of sweets.
“I grew up in London, UK, and Pick ‘n’ Mix sweets are a big part of my childhood. There used to be scoops to put candy in a bag. We even imported some of my favorite British sweets to stock in the shops,” she said. “You can come in, you can get your coffee, you can get soda, it was really important to me to have Diet Coke from a fountain, you can get tea and all kinds of fun drinks. Then you can come over and do the Pick ‘n’ Mix section,” she said. The bag features some prints from the brand.
When asked if she plans to open more Nell’s in the U.S., Diamond said, “If this one works, we’d love to do that. It just felt like a great opportunity to share more of our creative side with our community and add some sweet treats to the shopping experience.”
When asked why she chose Charleston as her fourth location, Diamond said, “I’ve always loved Charleston. I’ve visited it a few times already. It is such an incredible city with so much beautiful architecture and history. Quite a few of our clients, even if they didn’t live in Charleston, traveled to Charleston at least once a year. Our customers tell us it is their favorite destination. We are also in two other resorts, Nantucket Island and Palm Beach, and both stores are doing very well for us. Charleston felt like a natural next step for us when we had the opportunity to finalize 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 plans to try the food and beverage concept in Charleston and see how it goes.
Regarding the current retail business, Diamond said: “It’s great. We’ve had such a great experience building this very loyal community that calls itself “Nap Dress Nation.” They have been very supportive of the brand as we expand and build, so it has been a really fun few years building the business.”
The Nap Dress is the cult favorite garment that has experienced explosive growth and put the brand on the fashion map. Despite the name of the garment, the Nap Dress is not specifically intended for sleeping, but is intended to provide a comfortable option for the wearer to spend the day.
Since launching online in 2016 with bedding, Hill House Home has quickly expanded into ready-to-wear, accessories, children’s clothing, shoes and outerwear.
Hill House Home just started wholesaling its collection, and Shopbop and Saks are the company’s two largest accounts. They also sell their children’s clothing at Maisonette and they sell bridal looks at Over the Moon.
Describing the Charleston store, Diamond said, “We really wanted it to almost reflect an apartment. The Nell’s section is almost like your kitchen. There is also a small area with a bed to display some of the bedding and a wardrobe area are the changing rooms. “It feels very homely and nice. A lot of what we do has its origins in the home,” says Diamond. “We mainly use home decorators for our stores. And to make them feel as homely as possible.”
The Charleston store is 80 percent fashion and 20 percent home, which mimics the overall business operations. “We also have a nice children’s shop,” she says.
Diamond said they are focusing on the categories they are in now. Within fashion, swimming has been very successful, as has fashion in general. The company launched wallpaper (wallpaper, fabric and decorative cushions) a few months ago. “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 happy to show that in our store in Charleston. None of our other stores have 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 has a fitted empire waist and flows into a full skirt with lots of movement. “It’s doing really well and we’ll have quite a few available,” she said.
When asked where else she plans to open new stores, Diamond said: “We are looking forward to it, but nothing has been confirmed yet. Both Charleston and Dallas have been in the making for a long time. We spent a lot of time designing both. We have a lot of customers in both geographic regions, so we are so excited to meet them in person and have them try on our product. So many people have discovered Hill House over the years through fashion and our Nap Dress. So stores really give us the opportunity to introduce them to everything we do, and that’s so extensive.”
Hill House has no other distribution in Charleston. “What we found in our existing stores that were open is that we get an average of 70 percent new customers. Stores are also a great way to meet new customers and introduce them to the brand,” she says.
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