Early in my trade magazine career, I had a boss who stressed the importance of retail store visits. Trade-show travel often included a side trip to a nearby department or specialty store, where a group of editors, with our boss in the lead, would make our way around the home department to examine the signage, the category adjacencies, the cross merchandising and other practices that would inform our retail reporting.

The habit has never left me. For the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to travel to several different parts of the country for either work or personal reasons, and I couldn’t help but stop and visit a home décor store wherever and whenever I could, often with family members in tow.

A collective 3,000 or so miles later, here’s what I discovered:

White’s Mercantile, Nashville, Tenn.

We’ll start in Nashville, Tenn. where I traveled in May for my daughter’s college graduation and where White’s Mercantile, “a general store for the modern tastemaker” is based. The retailer has several locations; the one I stopped into is housed in an iconic old gas station. Inside, the worn wooden floors, shelving and display cabinets give off a general store vibe, but the merchandising and the assortment, which ranges from men’s gifts to children’s toys to an adjacent room full of dinnerware, glassware, cookbooks and gourmet food, is spot-on for modern day living. White’s Mercantile is a 2025 HAT Retail Star.

Duo Home, Springfield, Ill.

Duo Home sits only six miles off I-70, which runs the entire width of Ohio, so there was no way I could pass up a chance to stop by on the way to move my daughter from New York to Madison, Wis. Duo Home is one of HAT’s 2025 Retail Stars, and its owners, Vicki Rulli and Tom Heaphey, were featured on our September cover. Although my husband and I dropped in on a Sunday afternoon with no advance notice, they welcomed us warmly and readily gave us a tour of the 100+ year-old warehouse that they have converted into a store with a fantastic industrial chic vibe. The store is constantly evolving, as Rulli and Heaphey have noted in a recent Elevated Retail column; they are currently building their tabletop assortment and planning more community events, while maintaining their wall décor business, Itinerant Studio, which is also based in the same building.

Orange Tree Imports, Madison, Wis.

Once we helped set our daughter up in her new apartment in Madison, Wis., my husband and I had time to explore the neighborhood, and that included Orange Tree Imports, which is situated just a few blocks away from the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Store owner Carol Schroeder wrote the book, Specialty Shop Retailing and is a contributing columnist for our sister pub, Gifts & Decorative Accessories. She recently penned a column about whether the end of the de minimis exemption would be good for gift retailers. Although her store is more oriented towards gifts and gourmet housewares than home décor, it is a great example of how to appeal to the local community with local goods (there is a clear love for Wisconsin here) and demonstrates how to draw the eye by massing out color and pattern in merchandising displays.

Phipps Conservatory Gift Shop, Pittsburgh, Penn.

Phipps Conservatory in downtown Pittsburgh spans 15 acres and has a 14-room glasshouse, 23 distinct gardens and a Center for Sustainable Landscapes — but its gift shop is also worth talking about. It’s stocked with unique houseplants and all the tools and products needed to sustain them, delightfully cross-merchandised with floral- and plant-themed gifts and décor. One display of strawberry-shaped stools, choir rugs shaped like lemon wedges, and tea towels festooned with citrus slices tastefully leans into the fruit trend, while an adjacent wall display shows off an assortment of honey and bee-themed items. I bought a cube of solid, sustainable dish soap and a cool-looking air-filtering plant before my husband and son pulled me out of there, but left to my own devices, I would have lingered.

Patina, Minneapolis, Minn.

Patina has been on my radar for quite a while; it is a HAT Retail Star and received the Best Home Décor store award during the 2024 Retail Excellence Awards. The retailer operates eight stores in the Minneapolis region, but with only about an hour to spare before a family wedding in August, I picked the closest one to our hotel, which was in Roseville, Minn. I was not disappointed. There is a lot to take in here: one cross-merchandised vignette after another shows off an expert mix of on-trend products: stacks of crocheted quilts beneath a display of mugs, Volupsa candles and a tower of Taylor Swift books; shelves of appetizer and charcuterie board cookbooks situated next to jars of Stonewall Kitchen toppers and a basket of colorful wood salad servers; along with felted and flower-appliqued ottomans with a basket of felted wool slippers beside them. My husband allotted me 15 minutes in this store. I could have stayed a lot longer, but then I would have missed the wedding.