MIDTOWN — Just when everyone was heading out to the Hamptons this summer, Louis Marra and Allison Julius were busy bringing their Bridgehampton-based boutique to Manhattan.
The brother-and-sister team opened a second location of their swanky home goods store Maison 24 on Park Avenue between East 57th and East 58th streets last month.
The new venture will allow them to grow their 3-year-old business and bring a little funk to a more conservative retail area, with neighboring stores like Hammer Galleries, which specializes in the works of American and European masters, and James Robinson, a 99-year-old antiques store, said Marra.
“We decided to open in Midtown, and we are kind of a real point of difference in the neighborhood,” he added.
Marra and Julius, both in their mid-40s, were born in Manhattan and grew up in Westchester. Their mother was a fashion director and their father a display director for a department store, so they grew up surrounded by creativity.
The siblings opened the first Maison 24 in Bridgehampton in May 2008 after careers in marketing and retail.
“We’re unusually close as brother and sister, and its really kind of great,” Marra said. “There’s a level of trust there.”
Their boutique has since been written about in multiple Hamptons’ publications and praised for its eclecticism and eccentricity.
“It’s a real mix of everything,” said Marra, who lives on West 23rd Street in Manhattan.
The store’s online catalog features everything from hard candy to a bulldog lamp, shag rugs to vintage furniture tagged with graffiti.
The Park Avenue location also carries several pieces unique to that store, including a series of photographs by New York artist Dirk Westphal that feature New York City pay phones from 1994.
Prices throughout the store can range from $25 to $25,000, Marra said.
Summertime is slow in Manhattan, with vacations and summer homes pulling people away from the city. Plus, the economy is again taking a hit, just like it did around the time that Marra and Julius first started their business back in 2008.
Marra joked that launching new ventures in tough times has become their modus operandi. He said he’s taken to telling his friends they should know to sell their stocks as soon as he opens a new store.
“My sister and I feel like we are the new economic indicators,” he said.
“It’s scary, but we’re here,” he added. “We’ve had a really nice couple of years out in the Hamptons, and we seem to be off to a really good start here.”
