Fortunoff Backyard Store moving from Westbury to former Sam Ash Music in Carle Place

Fortunoff Backyard Store is relocating a third Long Island store to a smaller site that its president said will offer more visibility to customers.

This latest relocation will be the outdoor-furniture retailer’s second takeover of a former Sam Ash Music equipment store.

Fortunoff will move its store in Westbury, at 1500 Old Country Rd., less than half a mile away to a former Sam Ash in Carle Place, at 385 Old Country Rd., the outdoor-furniture retailer said in a statement Tuesday. Its 26,000-square-foot store in Carle Place will open early next year.

Hicksville-based Sam Ash Music Corp. closed its remaining 25 stores, including the Carle Place location, in July 2024, after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection about two months earlier. It closed its Huntington Station store, a space now occupied by a Fortunoff Backyard Store, in March 2024.

Fortunoff’s 36,000-square-foot Westbury store opened in 2010, at what was then known as The Mall at The Source but is now called Samanea New York. The store opened after the grandchildren of the founders of the Fortunoff department store chain reacquired the brand name and licensing, following a shutdown of the chain and bankruptcy filing in 2009.

The outdoor-furniture store was previously inside the flagship Fortunoff department store, which opened in Westbury in 1964.

Alan Fortunoff, then president and CEO of Fortunoff stores, was a driving force behind Simon Property Group Inc.'s 1997 development of The Mall at the Source, which was connected to the flagship Fortunoff store. The mall's name was a play on the Fortunoff slogan, "The Source."

“Fortunoff Backyard Store has been part of the Westbury community for more than 50 years, and we are so excited to have a new home,” Art Daly, general manager of the Westbury showroom, said in the statement Tuesday. “This new, state-of-the-art showroom will allow us to better serve our customers and help them create year-round outdoor spaces they can enjoy for years to come.”

Fortunoff Backyard Store’s Carle Place location will provide “improved customer visibility on a much busier road, but in a location where customers will find us more easily,” Curt Littlejohn, president and CEO of Fortunoff Backyard Store and Chair King Backyard Store, said in an email.

Asked whether rent played a role in the decision to relocate the stores to smaller spaces, he said several factors are considered when weighing store relocations.

"Better visibility, higher traffic, improved layout, etc. It’s not totally driven by rent cost," he said.

In March, Fortunoff Backyard Store opened its Huntington Station store in a former Sam Ash space that is about half the size of the 19,393-square-foot Melville store it is replacing. The Huntington Station store is more desirable than the Melville location, which will close in late December, because it is in an area targeted more to the retailer’s customer demographics in the Town of Huntington, Littlejohn said.

A Fortunoff Backyard Store also opened in an 11,909-square-foot space in Stony Brook in April, replacing a 14,000-square-foot Lake Grove store, which had been downsized a few years earlier from a 19,400-square-foot space.

Fortunoff sells merchandise online and at 30 brick-and-mortar stores in six East Coast states.

Evolution of a legacy

The Fortunoff business got its start when Max and Clara Fortunoff started selling pots and pans from a pushcart on Brooklyn’s Livonia Avenue under the elevated train tracks in front of their apartment in 1922.

In 1957, Max and Clara Fortunoff turned the business over to their three children, Alan and Lester Fortunoff and Marjorie Fortunoff Mayrock, but Lester sold his share of the business to his sister in the mid-1960s.

The second-generation owners relocated the eight Fortunoff shops in Brooklyn to a single location on Long Island in 1964, with the Westbury store. A Manhattan store on Fifth Avenue opened in 1979.

By 2003, the founders' grandchildren primarily were running Fortunoff, which had become a multimillion-dollar home furnishings and jewelry business that was headquartered in Westbury and had six high-end Fortunoff department stores in New York and New Jersey.

The Fortunoff Backyard Store as a stand-alone strategy for growth was launched in 2001, starting with a store in Lake Grove.

The sale of a majority stake in Fortunoff to two private equity firms in 2005 ended 83 years of sole family ownership.

A Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in 2008, when Fortunoff had 23 stores in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and another filing in 2009 brought about the demise of the retail business.

The founders' eight grandchildren, under a holding company called Fortunoff Brands LLC, bought back the intellectual property of Fortunoff, including the brand and trademarks, in 2009.

Former Fortunoff executives formed Furniture Concepts LLC, which does business as Fortunoff Backyard Store and licenses the brand name from Fortunoff Brands LLC, for outdoor furniture and seasonal products.

The Chair King Inc., a Houston-based, family-owned company doing business as Chair King Backyard Store, owns 82.5% of Furniture Concepts, while Isidore Mayrock, a grandson of Max and Clara Fortunoff, owns the remaining 17.5%.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.