Manse

The shop at 3210 O Street NW sits on a residential block in Georgetown that opened two new retail tenants in 2023: Manse and Tilley’s Pet Supplies, both of them filling storefronts on a stretch that had been underused for years. The Georgetowner covered both openings as a sign of life on the O Street corridor. Manse is the housewares shop. From the sidewalk it reads as a well-designed retail space, the window display organized with the kind of restraint that signals editorial judgment rather than volume. Inside, the selection is specific: linens, glassware, garden accessories, soaps, and decorative objects, all of them artisan-made and most of them things you would not find in a department store.

Andrew Coon and his husband Adam Howley founded Manse in 2021. The first location opened in Old Town Alexandria, in Corsair Alley at 113 South Columbus Street, a courtyard address that gave the store its character before it expanded to Georgetown. Coon came to the business from a background in retail management and had been thinking about this kind of store for a long time. His approach to buying is deliberate: he selects each product himself and applies a standard that excludes anything likely to appear elsewhere. The shop has been featured in Southern Living, which covered it as an example of a particular kind of thoughtfully edited home goods boutique that is harder to find than it should be.

The inventory covers the domestic range without trying to be a furniture store. Linens, which Coon sources from small producers and artisan operations, make up a significant portion of the floor. The glassware runs from everyday drinking glasses in unusual forms to decorative pieces meant for a sideboard. Garden accessories include objects that work in both indoor and outdoor contexts. The soaps and bath goods are from makers who manufacture in small quantities with visible ingredient sourcing. The overall effect is a shop that solves the specific problem of finding a gift that is genuinely considered, made well, and not something the recipient has already seen.

The Georgetown location is the second store and operates with the same buying philosophy as Alexandria. Coon has described the selection principle as finding things that will not be seen everywhere, which is the right aspiration for a housewares market where most mass retail carries more or less the same product. What arrives at Manse is the result of a buying process that starts from the object rather than from a category.

Hours run Monday through Saturday from 11 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, and Sunday from noon to 5. The O Street address is a short walk from Wisconsin Avenue and from the Georgetown University campus. Parking on the residential blocks around the shop is permit territory, but the walk from Wisconsin Avenue takes under five minutes. For first-time visitors, the shop rewards a slow walk through: the pieces are small enough in scale that the details matter, and the staff can explain the sourcing behind what is on the shelves.