OKA and Ballard Designs home goods stores open in Houston.
Two new home goods stores have opened in Houston recently: Londonbased OKA and Ballard Designs, known more as a catalog operation.
Before now, you had to visit England to shop at OKA, a store founded in 1999 by three friends — Sue Jones, Annabel Astor and Lucinda Waterhouse. The new Houston store is the chain’s first in the U.S., and it’s located on West Alabama at the site of the short-lived Wisteria store.
Ballard Designs, based in Atlanta, created a store layout that feels like a walk through its catalog, mimicking room vignettes nearly identically. It’s in a former Gap location on West Gray in Highland Village.
Here’s a first look at both stores.
OKA Houston
Blue and white chinoiserie porcelain, spectacular faux shagreen goods and a variety of stunning lamps, shades and decorative pillows will make the new OKA home goods store a first-stop on your shopping circuit.
Its route from Chelsea to Houston comes in part through its collaborations with Adam Lippes, an American fashion designer making his first foray into the home goods world with a collection of fine china, glassware and table linens with OKA, and his connections to Houston’s Courtney Sarofim and the Sarofim family.
Sarofim and her sister-inlaw, New Yorker Allison Sarofim, are fans of Lippes’ fashion, and the family has invested in Lippes’ business. When Courtney Sarofim’s mother, Elyse Lanier, chaired the MFAH’s Bayou Bend spring fashion show in 2019, Lippes was the featured designer.
Months later, Sarofim hosted a dinner in her Houston home for Lippes and Jones, OKA’s creative director and one of its founders, according to Krista Stelling, OKA USA’s senior vice president of sales and marketing.
Stelling said Jones was so taken with the city and the Sarofims’ devotion to Lippes that she chose Houston as the site of their first U.S. store.
Lippes’ goods are featured in a dining room vignette with a fully set table and a large “Adam Lippes X OKA” sign on an emerald green background. (You can’t miss it.)
His Roseraie dinnerware ($60-$250) has butterflies and botanicals filling a white background in a raised pattern, and it’s meant to blend well with other pieces — maybe antiques — that customers already have. Glassware in a simple, curvy silhouette and white linen napkins with botanicals embroidered in a corner round out the collection.
It’s light and fresh and feels firmly American, in a store filled with goods made with a big dash of somewhere else.
OKA, which takes its name from “ochre” — an earthy mustard yellow — a color found throughout the world, even if it feels decidedly British Colonial.
The store isn’t necessarily filled with the color — it’s filled with every color you can imagine. Prices will appeal to shoppers who love to mix high, middle and low price points in their homes.
It all fits with the ethos of Jones, posted on the wall in a memorable quote: “If you’ve ever been inspired to set a proper table on a Tuesday for takeout …”
What OKA does really well are blue-and-white dishes, especially its Kraakware, made in the likeness of Ming and Qing period pottery. (Dinner plates are $65; a breakfast cup and saucer runs $60.)
They use good quality velvet, silk and linen in their pillows, most of which are $75-$80 for the cover only. (Down inserts are another $18-$20.) If you’re in the market for floor cushions, poufs or stools, OKA’s include cubeshaped floor pillows made of goat hair ($425), round stools in velvet or leather ($325-$475) and chrome and cowhide camp stools ($495).
If you think it’s hard to find an interesting lampshade, take a look at those at OKA ($60-$225), made with cotton, linen and silk, plain, in stripes or with block print patterns in a variety of colors.
OKA’s lamps and shades come with a lesson, explained design associate and lamp expert Travis Simmons. In England, they make lamps not with harps but with “carriers” that hold a shade atop the lamp. If you buy an OKA shade for a lamp you buy in the store, you’ll be fine, but if you’re buying a shade for an American lamp, you’ll need to buy a $5 adapter. (They’re available online now but should be in the store soon.)
A good supply of rattan storage accessories are assembled on one wall, combined with pieces made of faux shagreen — a product OKA has spent two decades perfecting.
Its rattan includes storage boxes ($110-$195), tissue box holder ($50), jam carrier ($65) and a deeper carrier for flatware ($80). They also have a large laundry basket with a lid ($325) and a smaller lined wastebasket with a lid ($120). All are made in Myanmar.
Its shagreen covers simple accessories such as a tissue box holder, soap dispenser, brush holder or small tray ($110 each) as well as furnishings, including the Dalu Sideboard ($3,195) or the Honshu Desk ($1,795).
Ballard Designs
If you love flipping through the pages of the Ballard Designs catalog, the chain’s new Houston store was made just for you.
Online or catalog shopping misses the sensory experience: seeing the depth of colors, feeling the quality of fabric or materials and testing comfort by sitting in a chair or on a sofa. With Ballard’s brickand-mortar location, shoppers can get around all of those what-will-it-reallylook-like jitters.
Ballard Designs began as a shopping brochure in 1983, expanding over the years to eventually have an e-commerce site in 1999. Its first store was opened in Tampa, Fla., and its first designer collection was a collaboration with Suzanne Kasler. Its flagship store is in Ballard Design’s hometown, Atlanta.
This is Ballard’s third Texas store, with two already open in Dallas and Fort Worth.
Ballard launched its top-selling Amalfi outdoor furniture in 2006 and the cast-aluminum collection still is a customer favorite. They also have collections in teak and all-weather wicker, including the Harbour Collection by Suzanne Kasler
Expect window displays to change with the season and catalog. They are currently filled with outdoor furniture, cushions and décor. There’s plenty of indoor furniture, too, it’s just not all front and center.
You can see samples of rugs you can purchase, drapery panels and hardware and bedding set up in bedroom vignettes.
For now, store associates will casually monitor store capacity, though on weekends, when it gets busier, they may meter the traffic to allow shoppers to social distance.