This story of Henry & June, a new Virginia-Highland shop named for author Henry Miller and his second wife, is about coffee and clothing—unlike the erotic 1990 movie of the same name, which is about the famous literary couple and a ménage à trois. But both involve a writer and his muse. Co-owners and couple Camryn Park and Jim Chambers met at Octane in Grant Park two years ago. She was selling vintage cameras; he was a writer, pretending to know about vintage cameras as an excuse to speak to her. They moved in together a week later. Park had always wanted to open a clothing boutique, and Chambers had wanted to do something with coffee. In July, the couple combined their dreams, opening Henry & June.
The boutique offers pieces for men and women and is chock-full of hard-to-find national brands like Creatures of Comfort, Band of Outsiders, and Rachel Comey, as well as local designers like Abbey Glass and Megan Huntz. Accessories start around $60, while designer dresses can run up to $600. But it’s meant to be more than just another clothing store. With exposed white brick walls, a glossy black floor, and copper fixtures, Henry & June feels more like a gallery, with clothing displayed like art.
The shop is the only place in the city that serves Nashville’s Crema coffee, keeping with the couple’s vision to bring in expertly crafted products that can’t otherwise be found in Atlanta. On a road trip in February, Park and Chambers were inspired by independent stores in San Francisco and L.A. that had mastered the edgy, downtown-cool aesthetic—with impeccable craftsmanship, too. They also looked to shops in Brooklyn, where Chambers, a grandson of Anne Cox Chambers, was raised. “If someone asked us where they could find shopping like that in Atlanta, we wouldn’t know what to tell them,” Park says. “You have Urban Outfitters and vintage shops or really high-end retailers like Sid and Ann Mashburn, but there’s nothing in between. We wanted, for lack of a better phrase, expensive hipster clothes.” They’ll get that in pieces like a white, V-neck linen dress that retails for $506.
This article originally appeared in our September 2014 issue.
