Fortunoff Backyard Store's relocation of 2 Long Island stores to include former Sam Ash Music, Waldbaum's spaces

Fortunoff Backyard Store’s plans for Northeast growth include two store relocations on Long Island.

The outdoor-furniture retailer will move its Melville store to a smaller space in an area targeted more to the retailer’s customer demographics in the Town of Huntington, said Curt Littlejohn, president and CEO of Fortunoff Backyard Store and Chair King Backyard Store. 

Fortunoff Backyard Store also is relocating its Lake Grove store to a more visible site in Stony Brook, he said. 

The retailer's Melville store will relocate from a shopping center to a freestanding, leased building about 4 miles away, in Huntington Station, at 269 Old Walt Whitman Rd.  Sam Ash Music Stores vacated the Huntington Station building in March 2024.

The Fortunoff Backyard Store in Melville, at 610 Broadhollow Rd., occupies a 19,393-square-foot space and opened around 2010. 

The retailer's 9,369-square-foot Huntington Station store will open around Jan. 1, 2027, Littlejohn said.

“We were looking for a more efficient space and it’s across [the street] from the Walt Whitman [Shops] mall, which is very appealing to us because it represents our customer [base],” said Littlejohn.

Walt Whitman Shops has some high-end retailers, including Bloomingdale’s, Gucci and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Fortunoff Backyard Store’s Lake Grove location opened in a 19,400-square-foot space at 1995 Nesconset Hwy. in 2010, but it downsized to 14,000 square feet a few years ago.  The store closed in August and will relocate before Thanksgiving to Stony Brook, at 2162C Nesconset Hwy., Littlejohn said.

The store is moving for "better visibility and [an] unobstructed view from a busy roadway. The old location is being reconfigured [by the landlord] in a way that decreased our visibility," he said.

The Lake Grove and Stony Brook locations are less than a mile apart.

In Stony Brook's Brooktown Plaza, Fortunoff Backyard Store has leased a 11,909-square-foot unit, in a portion of the space that a Waldbaum’s supermarket vacated in 2015, said Ian Goldfeder, an associate at Katz & Associates, the Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey-based real estate brokerage that managed the leasing.

Planet Fitness and HomeSense split the majority of the former supermarket space in 2019. 

The Fortunoff name became famous as a family-owned chain of high-end home furnishings and jewelry stores in the New York metro area decades ago, but the business shut down in 2009 after its second bankruptcy filing.

The eight grandchildren of the retailer's founders reacquired the Fortunoff brand name and licensing in 2009 for separate jewelry and outdoor-furniture retailing, which is how the Fortunoff Backyard Store name was resurrected.

Fortunoff Backyard Store sells merchandise online and at 29 East Coast stores, as the chain has been expanding into new markets in recent years.

The retailer’s three stores in Virginia opened last year in the northern region of that state — in Woodbridge, Falls Church and Sterling — and a fourth, in Springfield, will open on March 1, Littlejohn said.

Building on 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.

By 2003, their 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, including a store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan that was the flagship of the jewelry division.

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 founder’s 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%.  

Fortunoff Backyard Store is a sister retailer to Chair King Backyard Store, a chain of 22 stores. The retailers employ a total of about 300 people, Littlejohn said.

'We are optimistic'

The overall furniture industry has been challenged by supply chain issues, rising tariffs and a slow housing market due to high interest rates over the past few years.

But Fortunoff Backyard Store’s sales are up this year, said Littlejohn, who declined to disclose sales numbers.

“The only thing I would say is that 2025 is showing growth over 2024, and we are optimistic about our planned performance in 2026,” he said.

He attributes the performance to a good selection of furniture, customers reacting well to promotions and knowledgeable employees providing a high level of customer service.

The majority of the merchandise sold by Fortunoff and Chair King stores is manufactured in Southeast Asia, he said.

Some of the product lines have shifted from factories in China because of U.S. tariffs on the country’s exports, he said.

Most U.S. outdoor furniture comes from China, which now has tariff rates that, when stacked, can run up to 55%, said Bill McLoughlin, editor in chief of Furniture Today, a Greensboro, North Carolina-based trade publication.

The majority of outdoor furniture sales occur between spring and midsummer, so retailers would have purchased that wholesale inventory before the tariffs, plans for which were first announced by President Donald Trump on Feb. 2, took effect this year, he said.

“So the real impact for the outdoor season, we’ll be seeing in spring 2026,” he said.

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.