When Stuff, a vintage consignment store, shut down in January 2024, customers mourned. The store’s late hours, well-curated selection, and impeccable disco/new wave soundtrack brought oddball glamour to a once-desolate section of Valencia.
Now, a Stuff offshoot, founded by one of its former vendors, will officially return to the Mission District with a soft opening on Sept. 5 and a grand opening on Oct. 4.
Stuff by Luxe is settling into a 20,000-square-foot two-store warehouse at 1830 Harrison St. near 14th Street, four blocks east of Stuff’s former Valencia site. When it opens, it will become the largest vintage consignment shop in the Bay Area, according to its co-owner Ha Kwan.
“It’s really convenient for our customers who used to shop at Valencia to be able to come here,” Kwan said on Wednesday afternoon after a day of helping vendors offload their merchandise. “So I’m super happy.” Behind her, Kwan’s son busily vacuumed a windowsill.
The shop’s grand opening on the first Saturday of October will feature a street fair from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The fair will continue every first Saturday of the month and include food trucks from Off the Grid and curated booths selling arts and crafts from West Coast Craft.
Kwan offered a tour of the half-filled space. She had spent the day with vendors filling up the skylight-lit rooms with furniture, home decor, sculptures, paintings, and more.
Half of the space has a cozy, vintage feel with hardwood floors and wood beams. Oil paintings and modern art posters hang on the walls and furniture and home decor of all kinds lay around the floor from teak and rosewood cabinets to a post-modern iron bedframe to a wooden miniature giraffe.
The other half presents a more modern, industrial look with a concrete floor and steel beams. This side features a mezzanine that overlooks the ground floor for events.
Kwan said she wants the place to be more like a showroom and not “your typical antique mall” where customers shop in a dark, dingy, and cluttered space. She picked this space so that everything is bright and open with high ceilings and sunlight pouring through the skylights to highlight the merchandise.
“If you have a few select pieces that are really good,” Kwan explained. “Then people can see it and can envision it in their homes”
Kwan, a former tech worker and an avid mid-century furniture collector, started out as a vendor with the original Stuff back in 2021, selling furniture under the brand name Luxe.
Like dozens of other vendors at Stuff, Kwan was saddened to learn that owners James Spinello and Will Lenker had to close shop last year after lease negotiations failed. That space is still empty.
Spinello and Lenker decided not to open another location — but told former vendors and employees that they could use the Stuff name and branding if they wanted to open their own businesses. Kwan and her husband Fred, a retired city worker, took them up on the offer. The Kwans combined the name of their vintage stall, “Luxe” with the “Stuff” logo, and dubbed the new operation “Stuff by Luxe.” Other former vendors, Angelina and Joe Carling, opened Stuff Vintage Modern, also known as Stuff East Bay, in Albany.
The Kwans opened “Stuff by Luxe” in Russian Hill at 1545 Pacific Ave. in March 2024, only two months after the original Stuff closed. Sitting between Larkin Street and Polk Street, it is only 5,300-square-foot — less than a third of the old location on Valencia. The store is still open daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. while Kwan sets up a second shop in the Mission.
Getting the business off the ground was scary at first — Kwan quit her human resources job in tech to work full-time opening the new store. But she and her husband had help from Spinello and Lenker, who had made lemonade out of lemons and turned their heartbreak at closing Stuff into a retirement to the island of Oahu. The duo – while enjoying the Hawaiian beaches – would occasionally hop on a call with her and offer her advice.
“It was a major change,” Kwan said. “But I love to be able to help support all of these vendors and make them successful.”
Now that the soft opening is only a month away, Kwan said, she is in the store every day to help vendors offload their goods. Kwan hopes to mentor new sellers, offering tips on how to price their pieces. She also plans to create a space for furniture-makers and artists to sell their own works.
Kwan said while none of the old staff will be back to work for the new Stuff by Luxe in the Mission, she is able to help at least some 40 to 50 vendors continue to sell their pieces in the neighborhood to customers that come from all over the Bay Area, the U.S., and abroad.
“I got to carry on the Stuff name and keep it alive and keep it thriving,” Kwan said. “We are excited.”
Love it !!
Stuff was beloved ? Stuff was a staple of the city but it was an over priced pedantic place 20 years ago. And only got worse over time. Weird $20 painting for $800 it was not a good neighborhood place. At some point we got to stop standing up for the places that make us nostalgic when they basically were atrocious exploitative places.
Stoked for Stuff!!
yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Stuff is good.