Glick Textiles Sewing Up Its Southwest Fwy. Business; Furniture Royalty Moving In

Nest-Feathering and costume-designing customers of Glick Textiles Fabric Warehouse learned from a “pre-announcement” mailer over Thanksgiving that the Upper Kirby interior decor resource is closing and the company is going out of business. The property was sold mid-month by Levan Group I — the outfit behind Midtown’s High Fashion fabric, furniture, and home-goods empire — for an undisclosed price, though the asking price was $3.8 million. Glick, a sister company of High Fashion Fabrics and High Fashion Home, will vacate by February 2013. The site’s new owner is a familiar furnishings venture, planning an “enhanced concept” for the freeway-side spot.

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Chair King plans to remodel the property extensively, then open a new store there featuring higher-end merchandise.

Glick’s warehousey spot, tidier inside than out, carries upholstery, drapery, trims, and pillows — plus an assortment of impulse-buy items, many of which have little to do with household use. Glick Textiles was founded in 1944, but has only been open to the public since 2002, when the company shifted from strictly wholesale (apparel, special occasion, and dance/party fabrics) to retail, with expanded home-tweaking materiel. The 1966 warehouse-distribution property at 2327 Southwest Fwy. has been Glick’s home for about 15 years; the company had relocated from a previous long-term spot downtown at Capitol and Hamilton that was affected by freeway expansion.

Levan Group I bought the former printing company property in 2002, folding Glick into its business holdings. The 20,115-sq.-ft. building occupies a shallow 36,625-sq.-ft. site abutting a stretch of long-abandoned, trackless railroad right-of-way once targeted (the plan was rejected by voters in the eighties) as a heavy rail transit corridor. Magic Island, shuttered since Hurricane Ike but planning a comeback, is 2 lots up the eastbound feeder road, near the Green Bank HQ at Greenbriar Dr. Northampton Place, a gated community fronting North Blvd. in Boulevard Oaks, is just over the chain-link fence installed earlier this year around Glick’s pulverized-by-heavy-use parking lot. Around the corner, the District at Greenbriar apartment complex is under construction on the former site of the Greenbriar Chateau.

Photos: CALwords

2 Comment

  • Sad to see yet another unique Houston store for do-it-yourselfers bite the dust. I had purchased quite a few things there over the years. Leggett’s, which was a similar type of store downtown had closed a number of years back… Inside-the-loop dirt is just getting more valuable, forcing these smaller ventures out of business…

  • Oh no – I’m sorry to see Glick go. I was a regular customer of Glick and looked forward to finding new things to recover.