Wayfair opens first Atlanta store. Here’s a look inside.
Online furniture company Wayfair on Tuesday opened a sprawling retail store in northwest Atlanta where shoppers are invited to experiment.
They can roll around in office chairs, see how water flows from shower heads or stack pillows of different colors and textures on a test couch.
That’s because home goods are “a deeply personal category,” said Liza Lefkowski, vice president of curation, brands and stores for Boston-based Wayfair. She led a store tour Monday.
“So much about it is very tactile,” she said. “You want to know that it’s comfortable. You want to know that it’s going to fit in your space, that it’s going to work for you.”
Wayfair’s new store is at Howell Mill Road and I-75, on the edge of West Midtown and Buckhead. It replaces a former Walmart that closed years ago after a fire.
Wayfair spent almost $22 million renovating the space, according to building permits filed in Atlanta.
It’s only the second large-format Wayfair store in the country as the online behemoth pushes further into physical locations.
Founded in 2002, Wayfair has grown into one of the largest furniture and home goods retailers in the U.S. The company’s website has more than 40 million items available to purchase from 20,000 suppliers, according to its 2025 annual report.
For Wayfair, the new store is an opportunity to build its customer base. The company said it had about 21 million active customers at the end of 2025, down 0.5% from the prior year.
But at the company’s first Wayfair store outside Chicago, which opened in 2024, more than half the customers are new to the brand, co-founder and CEO Niraj Shah said on a February earnings call.
“Walking through a physical store gives every shopper a broad view of the breadth of our categories and the depth of our assortment, often inspiring purchases they didn’t know they could get through Wayfair,” Shah said on the call. “We’re seeing this work in real time.”
The furniture industry has faced headwinds, including new tariffs, a stagnant housing market and cautious consumers.
Wayfair targets value-seeking shoppers and in 2025 grew its annual sales for the first time since 2020, according to CNBC. At the new Atlanta store, sale items sit in the middle of aisles “so you can find them really easily,” Lefkowski said.
“Especially now, customers love value,” she said. “They love deals. They want to know that they’re getting quality for the price that they pay. And so showing up with an assortment that really speaks to value at any price point is super important.”
At 150,000 square feet, Wayfair’s new Atlanta store is a little less than half the size of the Ikea store at Atlantic Station. But in a similar fashion, the store serves both as a showroom and retail store, with design vignettes to spark inspiration. Many of the big items like couches must be ordered for delivery, but there is a wide swath of products available to purchase on-site.
“If you can fit it in your car, I want you to be able to take it home with you that day,” Lefkowski said. Each item label has a QR code that can link the shopper to the product listing in the Wayfair app or website.
The store features 18 departments, spanning furniture, home renovation and housewares. While thousands of products are on display, it’s just a fraction of Wayfair’s online catalog.
“We built the assortment to represent what we believe captures the majority of tastes and demand on the (website),” Lefkowski said. “So that assortment is designed to be very intentional to represent the look, the price points that our customers want.”
The store offers free design services. And it has a cafe called the Porch, which sells all-day brunch items, sandwiches, salads, coffee, beer and wine.
Lefkowski said Wayfair picked Atlanta for a new store because it has a large customer base here. The company operates a distribution center in McDonough, which speeds up delivery, she added.
Wayfair announced the Atlanta store in early 2025. The company has other stores planned in Columbus, Ohio; Denver; and Yonkers, New York. But it hopes for a nationwide footprint, Lefkowski said.
“We believe Atlanta, for example, can have many stores,” she said.
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