I thought it had closed, but the most exquisite store in the world -- I discovered this last weekend -- lives on.
It's quite simply the ur store. There is none sourced with better taste. There is none more beautifully arranged. If you can't find something in it that you would like to purchase, the failing is yours, not theirs.
What is this place? It is De Vera, which I first discovered on Hayes Street in San Francisco some fifteen years ago. It specialized in fine glassware but would also feature Asian antiquities, perhaps, along with some English art pots, a medieval tile, a boulder, moss arranged in a jar, a South American puppet, an abalone shell, a diamond encrusted skull (well, I never saw one of those, but it would have fit right in).
Everything was the best of its type. If it was flawed or damaged then it was better for being so.
This placed wasn't so much stocked as curated. Like a museum, it was above mentioning anything as quotidian as price. If you really had to, you could ask.
I could never afford to shop there (I did ask), and in a way to take something out of it was almost unimaginable -- it would feel like looting or buying just one piece of a mosaic.
But it has always been, to me, the perfect, platonic form of a retail establishment, lost to the world, though, I'd thought.
Then this weekend Jennifer and I were wandering down Maiden Lane, off Union Square, in San Francisco. And in the plain light of that most-sought-after shopping location, there it was.
They were just turning off the lights but answered our knock and let us in to wonder anew. They'd moved both here and to New York, it turns out, after their two Hayes St locations closed.
It's still exquisite. There are still no prices. It's still the best store in the entire world.