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Former SARCA Owner Opening Citizen Stone in Lincoln Park

By Paul Biasco | November 8, 2013 8:09am
 An outfit by French designer Valentine Gauthier, whose pieces will be available at Citizen Stone.
An outfit by French designer Valentine Gauthier, whose pieces will be available at Citizen Stone.
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Citizen Stone

LINCOLN PARK — The owner of the former Gold Coast boutique SARCA is opening a loft-style showroom called Citizen Stone in Lincoln Park next week.

Alexis Cozzini's SARCA closed in March due to a flood that ruined the store's inventory, but in the meantime Cozzini has been operating out of a private Lakeview location and doing home visits for customers.

Citizen Stone is set to open Monday at 1440 N. Dayton Street in a third floor loft that will act more as a showroom for customers in the know rather than a storefront boutique.

The store will feature high-end women's clothing, shoes, jewelry and accessories hand-picked by Cozzini during trips to fashion weeks across the globe.

"I like to find things that are hard to find in Chicago — often times hard to find in the U.S.," she said.

Unlike SARCA, Citizen Stone will carry home furnishings, accents, coffee table books, beauty products and some cool tech accessories.

Citizen Stone will also feature a website.

"When we were SARCA we never had a shopable website. That's a huge thing for any retailer," Cozzini said. 

The site, which will feature all of the items available at the physical store, will likely launch in January.

"I wanted this space to be a showroom where our existing customers could come and shop and see the merchandise in person," Cozzini said. "Also, I want to have a huge web presence and be able to do a majority of the business off the website."

The site will include a blog that Cozzini hopes will explain where most of the items came from and how they got to Citizen Stone.

"All of these items in the store have cool back stories," she said. "I want to tell them."

Some of those stories could include tales from her twice-yearly trips to Paris, a recent buying trip to Berlin and numerous visits to New York and North Carolina during the year.

Weekends at Citizen Stone will be by appointment only, but the store will be open for walk-ins from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays.