19411 Atrium Place
Known as Garden Ridge for many years, the original Katy "At Home" location opened as a Buyer's Market off-price shopping mall in November 1984 at the same time as a sister location close to North Houston. (As I don't have, or don't have permission to have, a proper facade picture, an ad will have to do, originally from The Houston Post and posted on
HAIF)
Like many of the things we will cover, we don't know a whole lot about the Buyer's Market beyond confirmation of existence, except that from a few pictures it looked very much like Garden Ridge/At Home did, except the "store" areas had walls and names, but it, along with another location on I-45, became Garden Ridge Pottery stores soon after the closure of Buyer's Market.
Louisiana and Texas Southern Malls & Retail does have information including opening, closing, and what a total failure it was. After the closure of it and the Airtex location, they became Garden Ridge Pottery's second and third Texas location (as it was known at the time) beyond its original location in Schertz, Texas. (I say Texas location because an Oklahoma location was opened in
October 1985 but sold in 1987
due to a disconnect from the partnership).
One of the things about Garden Ridge was that all the way until 2015, it lacked access from Katy Freeway! This stems from the fact that originally a railroad ran between the frontage road and the parking lot. The access question was mitigated somewhat with the development of commercial businesses in the mid to late 2000s, but in the 1990s, only Foxlake crossed the railroad, and Atrium Place did not connect with Fry Road (you had to go up to Park Row to work your way back around). With weird ways to get in like this, it's no surprise that Buyer's Market was a miserable failure, and
Garden Ridge nearly filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter (years before the actual filing).
From what I could find, from moving in around 1986 up until 2014, Garden Ridge Pottery (later simply "Garden Ridge") maintained headquarters here. They also had a snack bar inside the original store (nothing too special, from what I heard mostly hot dogs and other similar fare), using the restaurant facilities from Buyer's Market. While snack bars were introduced in other stores in the late 1990s, they all closed during the mid-2000s bankruptcy of Garden Ridge.
As part of the transformation into At Home in 2014, the company moved its headquarters out of the building and toward Plano, leaving a number of back offices vacant and virtually abandoned, able to wonder inside them. I didn't wonder go too deep (didn't want to get in trouble) but the store was so understaffed (the front end area was massive but only a few people there) that no one seemed to mind. Like many stores past their prime, it was both a functional store and an abandoned urban exploration site at the same time.
I'm glad I saw it when I did. Later that year, I got word that it would be closed, with the At Home being "temporarily" closed.
By late 2017, At Home rebuilt with a new store but it was 127,000 vs 269,000 square feet (though during the At Home days, that 69k square feet used for offices was vacant). There was space for an additional retail store next to it.
Better pictures can be found elsewhere, but I only have two pictures of my own, one of an older map in the offices (I tried to take a picture so it could be easily read, despite in the dark, but lightening it up didn't help it out), and one of a sealed mall entrance.
