For years, the surest sign that someone in Buckhead was throwing a dinner party was a car idling in the cramped Andrews Square lot, hazard lights blinking, while its driver dashed into Lucy’s Market for a gift basket, a casserole, a bottle of wine, and three stems of something beautiful. That little parking lot has always asked something of its regulars — and, if Kim Wilson is right, a big part of the reason her beloved market is about to move.
“My customers tell me, ‘Kim, I don’t even come anymore because it’s such a hassle to get in there,’” Wilson told the Atlanta Business Chronicle, “and the last woman I told we were moving said, ‘Oh, thank goodness, because I’ve hit my tire rims so many times in this parking lot, it drives me crazy.’”
So Lucy’s is moving. After a decade tucked into Andrews Square at 56 East Andrews Drive, the market will decamp for a larger, free-standing building at 3402 Piedmont Road NE — a two-story landmark directly across Piedmont from Atlanta Tech Village. “Lucy’s has always been about creating an experience our customers can’t find anywhere else,” Wilson told the Buckhead Paper. “This new location gives us the space to continue growing while preserving the personality, service, and sense of discovery our customers have come to love. We’re grateful for the continued support of our community over the years, and we’re excited for this next chapter as we welcome both longtime customers and first-time visitors, making even more memories in our new home.”
From a gas station produce stand to a Buckhead institution
Lucy’s market is, by now, a piece of Buckhead folklore. Wilson, a former advertising sales executive with a passion for her own backyard vegetable garden, became what she has called an “accidental entrepreneur” in 2009, when she took over an abandoned gas station on Roswell Road and began selling produce she hand-picked at the farmers market before dawn each morning. She would set the fruits and vegetables out on the corner, chat with customers all day, pack up what didn’t sell, and start over the next morning.
The stand became a store. The store moved, and moved again — four times in its first decade — before landing in 2017 at Andrews Square, where it blossomed from a farmers market into one of the city’s go-to destinations for locally prepared food, fine wine, fresh produce, flowers and gifts. Named for the two Lucilles in Wilson’s life — her grandmother and her 33-year-old daughter — Lucy’s has become a “Buckhead Betty” staple, the kind of place where a shopper ducks in for a tomato and leaves with the makings of a party.
Much of the business today is in gifting. Wilson caters to an upscale clientele with personalized baskets that range from $100 to more than $1,000, shipped nationwide and assembled by hand for clients who include some of Atlanta’s biggest firms.
Ten thousand square feet, and every inch spoken for
The current Andrews Square space runs about 10,000 square feet, and Wilson’s team of more than 20 employees, as she put it to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, “need every inch.” The new home on Piedmont Road will exceed 16,000 square feet across two floors: office space, gift-basket assembly and storage below, with retail taking over the entire top floor.
And then there is the matter that has bedeviled Lucy’s shoppers for years. The new location offers more than 70 free parking spaces — a near-unimaginable luxury after the tight, in-and-out crush of Andrews Square, in one of the densest corners of Buckhead Village…