‘Leekan Designs’ to Shutter Next Month After 3 Decades of Selling the Unique
Photo: Google Maps
After three decades peddling unique antiques to SoHo, and most recently, the Lower East Side, Leekan Designs is hanging it up.
According to an announcement from the store earlier this week, the store at 4 Rivington Street will fold on March 3.
Since the early 1980s, the business has traded in antique and contemporary (oftentimes rare) tchotchkes from Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
“Time to close this chapter without sadness,” owner Annie Lee told us in an email.
Leekan Designs is actually a refugee from SoHo, where Lee and her husband began selling wholesale from their loft thirty-five years ago. They sold to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum and the Smithsonian, as well as to customers around the country.
The move to the Lower East Side happened in 1999 due to the rising rents in the home neighborhood. (They’ve been at 4 Rivington for ten years.)
“When I first relocated here from SoHo, I was excited because, despite several decades of underdevelopment, there was a thriving community of artists and a friendly neighborhood feel that was much stronger than in SoHo,” Lee wrote in a 2009 letter to City Planning Commission supporting the now-languishing East Bowery Preservation Plan.
The entire store is on sale until the last day.
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