Almost a year after shutting down all its operations, Finger Furniture — or at least another company using the same name and run by the same family — is open again. Owner Rodney Finger is claiming the newly renovated 600,000-sq.-ft. facility at 4001 Gulf Fwy. at Cullen near Eastwood is now the biggest furniture store in Texas. And that’ll likely be true for a bit longer — until the warehouse portion of that million-sq.-ft. Rooms To Go on I-10 past Katy opens in another month or so.
But at 200,000 sq. ft., Finger’s showroom is 5 times the size of the one at Rooms To Go. And then there’s that museum inside:
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Finger Furniture is built on the site of Buff Stadium, home of Houston’s former minor league franchise.
Inside the store is the Houston Sports Museum, which pays tribute to the Buffs as well as the Colt .45s, Astros, Oilers and other teams. On the floor of the museum is Buff Stadium’s home plate at its rightful spot.
Finger has thousands of items that will be rotated, including Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean’s mitt and cleats, and memorabilia from the Houston Wanderers, another minor league baseball team.
The Chronicle‘s David Kaplan makes the whole place sound kinda cozy:
The remodeled Finger store, which had been ravaged by Hurricane Ike, has a different look. The front lobby previously resembled a car dealership, Finger said, with sales associates standing behind a big desk. The new lobby has an aquarium, complete with electric blue lobsters and a flagstone brick wall, and is meant to feel like a den, he said.
Finger tells Kaplan the 83-year-old family business took on too much debt after he and his father, Bobby, started opening a whole bunch of new stores — and a huge new distribution center in Sugar Land — beginning in 2006. The Fingers also began operating local Ashley Furniture franchise stores. Bobby Finger died in 2007; by the following summer, the company had decided to convert all 4 remaining Fingers locations to Ashley HomeStores. Then last year, it sold that business — except for the I-45 location — to another operator.
- Old name, new start and Finger will become Ashley Furniture HomeStores [Houston Chronicle]
- Houston’s Finger sells stores, Finger’s new direction, Finger to convert all stores to Ashley format, Finger Furniture’s plans point to aggressive growth, and Finger sees sales doubling [Furniture Today]
- Finger Furniture re-opens flagship store [Houston Business Journal]
Photos: Candace Garcia
I wonder if the timing has anything to do with the City’s “going out of business” ordinance? What chapter was that again?
Am I crazy to ask the question why this site would not be an easier solution for the Dynamo’s stadium? It’s right on 45 South, has much better ingress/egress than the east end site, with dedicated exits going north and south, very close to downtown. Those are for sure. Looking closer, too, it makes for easy alternative use(s) for the stadium (which means TSU can have even more convenient use of the facilities with their campus not 2 miles away), near Hobby Airport for sports fan travelers/reporters/etc., and doesn’t take a ton of money to make the site possible since it already has a vast parking lot, utilities, (albeit obnoxious) pylon freeway sign. Knowing the Fingers family, they would take the call, and be happy to trade the site for another from the city for future development. Yahtzee!
They are building a homeless shelter there. Way to add value. You will never have a vibrate area with homeless shelters around everywhere.