Visiting the new Anthropologie store in Highland Park is much like taking a timeless trip around the world.
“That’s the idea,” says president Glen Senk of the new 10,000-square-foot store that opened Wednesday. “We want people to feel like they have been to a new and different place and are bringing something back from their travels.”
There’s handmade Versailles dinnerware, $14 for a cup and saucer to $68 for a serving platter; a teak Indonesian bench with ceramic tile (1920s-30s), $780, and diamond-pattern Tunis chairs with seats and backs woven of sea grass, $380 each.
Like the name suggests, Anthropologie is a fun study of people and places. This store, a subsidiary of the Philadelphia-based Urban Outfitters chain, sells home furnishings and women’s clothing and is the second in the Chicago area.
“There is a story behind almost everything we have here,” says Scott Gibree, who manages new store openings for Anthropologie. “We have antiques from different countries and reproduction designs based on one-of-a-kind originals.”
Carrying out the old and new theme, the store’s wooden floor boards were taken from old barns, and the ceiling is a reproduction, based on a tin ceiling in New York, complete with water stains and rust.
The store’s many vignettes inspire and delight. They include the Angels & Insects Room, where a thumb-size cockroach is encased in clear, glycerine soap, $7.50, and the Collectors Room, which includes glass cabinets that show 100- to 150-year-old industrial-size paper and wooden sewing bobbins, $15 each, a pine 9-by-6-foot cabinet from France built in the 1890s, $12,000, and vintage clocks from Holland, $180 each.
This store is at 1780 Green Bay Rd.; 847-681-0200. The other Anthropologie, which opened in December, is at 1120 N. State St.; 312-255-1848.