A Ma Maniére Flagship Store

It’s not often that you get to work on a building in a neighborhood with as much cultural significance in Atlanta as Sweet Auburn. Located in proximity to Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth home, we count ourselves lucky to have been able to collaborate as commercial architects with James Whitner and the Whitaker Group on the A Ma Maniére flagship store in the true Black entrepreneurial enclave that is Edgewood Avenue. Thanks for featuring our renderings Footwear News!

“We were partying a block over at 2 a.m. when I realized, ‘We need to do something much bigger here. This is where culture lives, culture actually happened here — civil rights, segregation, Jim Crow, Martin Luther King and Ebenezer Baptist Church as the moment of triumph or uprising.’” Whitner said. “I was in awe in the moment like, ‘We can leave from the club and walk to Martin Luther King’s house.’ You know how crazy that sounds? The symbolism [is meaningful]: ‘We’re able to do this [new store] because of that [moment in history].”

“The new door is a five-story building — which is also the first standalone A Ma Maniére location — that spans 23,000 square feet of real estate. It includes two floors for retail, another two for residential suites under its Living boutique hotel and lifestyle experience, and a top floor for its Eats dining experience that features a full-service kitchen for a restaurant and a rooftop lounge.”

“For us, hopefully, this gives the people who are originally from the community a sense of pride, something they can participate in meaningfully. It’s definitely more than a shopping experience,” Whitner said. “It’s about everything the space offers and all the good work that we can do.”

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