Deep Ellum News

Quirky gift store and early Deep Ellum settler will close up shop

Busts and vintage suitcases at Life of Riley in Deep Ellum

They were one of the first settlers in the renovation of Deep Ellum.

After six years, the adorable, quirky Deep Ellum gift shop Life of Riley is closing. The store was coming up on the end of its lease, and owner Billy Milner decided not to renew.

"The time has come to move onto new adventures," Milner says.

Milner opened the shop in 2013, with a mix of new and vintage goods that extended from greeting cards to candles to furniture to gifts.

Located at 2646 Main St., the shop was one of the early settlers in a property owned by then-new landlord/developer Scott Rohrman and geared toward the downtown/Deep Ellum client at the time, back when the neighborhood was still dominated by a small-scale, ground-level neighborly feel.

"Life of Riley was the first new lease for Scott Rohrman and Deep Ellum 42 when they purchased their Deep Ellum properties," Milner says. "I am very proud to have started the ball rolling and happy I could help to create what this great historical neighborhood has become."

In 2017, they relocated to the Carson Warehouse building, one of the few buildings in Deep Ellum that's on the historical register.

But things in the neighborhood have shifted, with high-rise buildings such as the Epic on one end and the Case on the other, and the arrival of touristy ice cream shops and other mainstream businesses.

"The neighborhood is in transition, it's not the same as when we moved in, and has not evolved into what I was expecting it to be," Milner says. "I have other businesses, including a really thriving business doing installations during the Christmas holidays, and just decided it was time to let one go."

While they won't have their own storefront, they'll move their vintage goods and bestsellers into a new store near the Design District that's an offshoot of Benny Jack's, the antique shop on Haskell Avenue.

They're also launching a candle line, called Riley's Small Batch Candles, since candles were among their biggest sellers.

As for Deep Ellum, everything in the store must go, with markdowns of 30 to 50 percent off, until it's gone.

closings deep-ellum

Kitchen News

Kitchen temple Sur La Table to close Knox Street Dallas location

Sur La Table

A longtime home cook favorite in Dallas' Knox Street district is closing: Sur La Table, the nationwide specialty retailer of cookware, kitchen electrics, and bakeware, will close its location at 4525 Cole St. at the end of January.

According to a spokesperson, the location is permanently closing on January 25.

Sales at the store have already begun, with 30 percent off everything in the store.

Sur La Table opened their first store in Seattle's Pike Place Market in 1972. From the beginning, their founder Shirley Collins partnered with the world’s best chefs and kitchen brands to bring customers trusted tools to make delicious memories.

Their in-house chefs teach 60,000 cooking classes a year to more than 700,000 people in kitchens and now online.

In addition to offering services like knife-sharpening, and selling gourmet goods which were not available elsewhere at the time, Sur La Table has played host to many chefs and cookbook authors over the years.

They were a "foodie" presence before there was such a thing when they first came to Dallas in 1998, opening off Knox Street, back when it was still a darling collection of shops and not the overdeveloped high-rise hell it is today.

It's tempting to blame the closure on factors such as online shopping; and Sur La Table did go through a pandemic-induced bankruptcy in 2020 when it closed nearly half of its stores.

However, the store's fortunes were not helped when it was forced to depart its original eccentric location at 4527 Travis St. for an invisible storefront on Cole Street, in order to make room for the Knox Hotel and Residences, a 140-room hotel managed by Auberge Resorts Collection, plus 48 ultra-luxury condominiums.

There are two other Sur La Table locations in the DFW area including Preston Royal which opened in 2017, and Southlake which opened in 2015, both of which will remain open. Two other locations — in Fort Worth at the Waterside shopping center, and Plano at Lakeside Village — closed in 2020.