The Merchandise Mart’s furniture showrooms have made it a center of the design world for generations.
But there’s a new challenger to the nearly 100-year-old Mart. A growing number of showrooms have set up shop in Fulton Market, further energizing the former meatpacking district where developers recently built millions of square feet of office space, along with thousands of residences.
“The Mart is always going to be a mainstay for the design industry,” said John Fellowes, CEO of Fellowes Brands, an Itasca-based home and workplace designer that just consolidated its Mart showrooms to 800 W. Fulton Market, a 19-story building opened in 2021 by developer Thor Equities. “But Fulton Market feels like a match for us, it has an energy to it, and being able to walk across the street to some of the best restaurants in Chicago is a feature you can’t get in many other places.”
The neighborhood has modern glass towers and renovated industrial structures that typically provide more natural light than conventional buildings, he added, perfect for displaying furniture and other goods, giving companies looking to rebrand themselves another option.
And even though Fulton Market is not nearly big enough to dethrone the Mart as Chicago’s showroom king, its popularity with manufacturers and designers was on display the second week of June. The West Loop neighborhood held its second annual Design Days, attracting thousands of industry buyers who browsed showrooms and compared products.
“What we saw and felt that week was momentum,” said Natalie Murray, director of brand and marketing for furniture manufacturer HNI Workplace Furnishings.
Merchandise Mart leaders say they don’t worry about the competition.
For one thing, the Mart doesn’t depend as heavily on furniture showrooms as it did in previous decades, according to Glen Weiss, co-head of real estate for Vornado Realty Trust, which bought the 4-million-square-foot building in 1998.
Two-thirds of its rentable space was once devoted to showrooms, with the remainder used by traditional offices. But as Chicago’s economy shifted, and many suburban offices migrated downtown, the Mart changed with the times. It just completed the second phase of a roughly $75 million makeover, adding a 15-room conference center, restaurants, a new fitness club, along with a riverfront park, all amenities prized by office tenants. The Mart has also signed big lease deals with Motorola Mobility, Allstate and W.W. Grainger and brought in high-tech users such as business incubator 1871.
Today, just one-third of its space is occupied by showrooms. That’s still much bigger than Fulton Market’s roster of design and furniture tenants, and Weiss said he doesn’t expect that to change. The Mart’s annual design industry event NeoCon, held the same week as Design Days, brought more than 50,000 visitors, dwarfing the Fulton Market event and equaling NeoCon 2019.
“This will still be the dominant place for the showroom industry,” he said.
MillerKnoll was the first major furniture company to move west to Fulton Market, according to Matthew Stares, the firm’s vice president of global real estate, architecture and development. In 2021, the company’s Herman Miller brand occupied 1100 W. Fulton St., a former meat packing facility transformed into a five-story, 45,000-square-foot showcase.
“The building we took for Miller was pretty rough, and there was a parking lot next to it,” Stares said. “So, it took a little vision to see it.”
But the company wanted space not just for industry insiders attending events such as NeoCon, but a ground-floor retail operation for everyday customers. And today, the streets outside Miller’s new home are often filled with shoppers visiting new stores nearby, including Patagonia.
“We had a great run at the Merchandise Mart,” said Stares, but Fulton Market has “a different kind of foot traffic.”
Several of the company’s brands kept their Mart showrooms.
MillerKnoll’s move paved the way for others, said Rachel Benitez, senior project designer for Kuchar, an interior design studio that creates showrooms in the Mart and Fulton Market.
“It was huge news, and everybody thought, ‘what a mistake,’ ” she said. “But in the end, it helped smaller companies get confident that it was OK to be over there.”
Many firms did follow in MillerKnoll’s wake, including flooring manufacturer Tarkett, which migrated from the Mart in 2022 to a Kuchar-designed showroom in Fulton East, a new boutique building at 215 N. Peoria St. developed by Parkside Realty.
Developer Sterling Bay completed Fulton Market’s 345 N. Morgan St., a 200,000-square-foot building, last September, and found its 13-foot, floor-to-ceiling windows were appealing to companies looking to show off products, according to Austin Lusson, vice president of leasing.
The company leased about 90% of 345 N. Morgan St. in the last 13 months, including several showroom deals. HNI Workplace Furnishings’ Allsteel brand occupied the entire third floor, while JSI Furniture took about half the sixth floor, and office furniture designer Humanscale opened a showroom and retail space on the ground floor.
All three came over from the Mart, Lusson said.
The new Gensler-designed building also allowed Allsteel to double its footprint, have its own street-level entrance, along with spaces for product demonstrations and TED-talk-style events, according to Murray. The presence in Fulton Market of big corporate names such as Google and McDonalds, along with many smaller firms, new hotels, restaurants, retail and thousands of high-end apartments, was also a plus.
“It’s fun to be in a space that feels energetic and diverse,” she said.
It didn’t hurt that while COVID-19 stilled the rest of Chicago’s downtown, construction of new buildings in Fulton Market went forward, and activity quickly returned to its streets.
“Fulton Market was the only submarket in Chicago where there was true retail activity happening, and new leases being signed in what was otherwise a truly dead period,” Lusson said.
Fellowes said even though the three-day Design Days didn’t have NeoCon’s scale, the event showed the neighborhood now has enough showrooms to attract thousands of visitors during the industry’s most important week, and that may encourage even more to make the jump to Fulton Market.
“There is a community of manufacturers and designers here, and that ecosystem is very important to us,” he said.
Kuchar Creative Director Sarah Kuchar-Parkinson said she also expects the industry to keep growing in Fulton Market. But her firm did far more work in the past year for companies sticking with the Mart.
“It will always be the hub,” she said. “Fulton Market makes sense for certain brands that want to feel different from the Mart, but it’s not for everybody.”
