Best of Atlanta 2014 Home & Garden

Repurposed Artifacts: The Nicholson Gallery

If you can put a piece of glass or marble on top of an industrial artifact, Martha Nicholson has turned it into a table—pigeon coops, sewing tables, gears, cogs.

Contemporary Classics: Switch Modern

You’ll never find a knockoff here. This is as close as Atlanta gets to Milan, with iconic modern brands like Flexform, Edra, and Poliform.

Local Furniture Store: Stanton Home Furnishings

In August, Stanton expanded next door, and it now sprawls over nearly 14,000 square feet. Light fixtures—geometric, modern, industrial—and upholstered armchairs are particular strengths, though owner Jimmy Stanton has always had a knack for accessories of the moment.

Affordable Contemporary Furniture: Room & Board

nformed by design movements such as Shaker, arts and crafts, Bauhaus, Scandi­navian, and midcentury modern, Room & Board uses natural, sustainable materials.

Secret Designer Boutique: Missoni Home at Roche Bobois

Roche Bobois shows off sleek contemporary furniture and dazzling lighting at its impressive new showroom on Buckhead Avenue.

National Furniture Chain: Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams

MGBW has anchored the corner of East Paces Ferry and Peachtree roads in Buckhead’s good times and bad. Its stylish collections stay fresh with frequent updates yet remain consistently comfortable.

New Furniture Designs: Ligne Roset

Modern furniture stores can range from boring to ridiculous (only Salvador Dalí can get away with a red sofa made to resemble giant lips).

Glam Accessories: Jackson Charles Home

Maybe it’s owner Eddie Brumbaugh’s background in the fashion industry that makes her appreciate rich textures, from hide rugs to furry pillows to leather sofas.

Fine Linens: Peacock Alley Design Studio

Master of matelasse, soothing colors, and sumptuous textures, Peacock Alley opened a design studio here in March—one of only two signature stores in the nation.

Artisan Furnishings: Atlanta Made

Located beside Kolo Collection, an upscale outdoor furnishings store (and founded by Kolo’s co-owner Michelle Larrabee-Martin), Atlanta Made features more than 90 metro-area artists.

Design Atelier: Townhouse

Robert Brown, one of Atlanta’s top designers, opened his first retail store to fill Atlanta’s gaping need for classy home accessories.

Tabletop: Steve McKenzie’s

From the colorful Blenko glass to R. Wood pottery and Mitchell Black’s graphic black-and-white china, the tabletop selection shines even more in this store’s new location near Miller Union restaurant.

Inspiring Accessories: Sugarboo & Co.

This nearly 10-year-old Roswell-based wholesaler has finally opened a retail shop. It’s worth a visit just to ogle the fun displays: handcrafted jewelry, arranged on decorative moss or trays of dried white beans, in wood-and-glass cases that smack of an old-fashioned general store.

Specialty Garden Center: Wilkerson Mill Gardens

Elizabeth Dean and Gene Griffith have turned their South Fulton nursery into a regional destination for hydrangea enthusiasts.

Outdoor Furniture: Authenteak

The 15,000-square-foot showroom of Authenteak features more than 100 sets of outdoor furniture, plus kitchens, fire pits, grills, rugs, fabrics, and accessories.

Plant Sale: Georgia Native Plant Society Annual Sale

Plants most likely to survive Atlanta’s unpredictable weather extremes are native species, and the place to find the widest selection of them is at the Georgia Native Plant Society’s annual sale.

Best-Kept Secret for Unusual Plants: Maple Ridge Nursery

This East DeKalb nursery offers one of the most wide-ranging selections of hard-to-find Japanese maple cultivars in the Southeast, a collector’s dream of unusual conifer cultivars, and more than 200 hosta varieties.

Do-it-at-Home Garden Tour: Cobb Master Gardeners’ Annual Tour

Tour landscapes designed on a realistic scale—like most gardeners’ actual yards—and meet the green thumbs who grew them at this annual Mother’s Day weekend tour.

Place to Find Garden Art: Raiford Gallery

This gallery offers a Noah’s Ark of ostriches, giraffes, dogs, cats, and other critters that an imaginative Kentucky team crafts from scrap metal.

Midcentury Modern Furniture: City Issue

Casegoods and chairs ranging from generic Danish modern to collectors’ darlings like George Nelson and Edward Wormley—plus, of course, the requisite Eames and Saarinen.

Vintage and Consignment Shop: Doubletake Recycled Luxury

This cozy store at the Old Fourth Ward’s Studioplex is like a CliffsNotes version of a fashion history book—with stunning visual examples.

Vinyl: Wax ’n’ Facts

Wax ’n’ Facts—the cluttered Little Five Points institution cofounded in 1976 by 2014 Georgia Music Hall of Fame inductee Danny Beard—has outlasted 8-tracks, CDs, and the “cassingle.”