Rising incomes, rising tastes

IF YOU HAVE been alive and alert in this city over the past five years, you cannot have failed to hear the legends of the silicon gold rush: the Microsoft millionaire who dropped $50,000 on a home entertainment system; the Microsoft millionaire who spent hundreds of thousands on a state-of-the-art kitchen for his new home even though he never cooks at home, because "they told me I'd need a kitchen if I ever wanted to sell this house"; the former bookstore clerk who pulled up to the old brick-and-mortar store in a spanking new Miata purchased with Amazon.com stock options. . . . We tell these can-you-believe-it tales as a way of deflecting envy, setting up as fools—"Fifty grand on a TV and stereo?!"—those whose riches have come a little too easily and a lot too early. The tales, I suspect, also justify our own increasingly affluent shopping habits. For while the success of Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, RealNetworks, and their e-kin have minted millionaires by the dozen, much of the rest of the city's middle class have seen their own boats rise on the same tide.

That prosperity has combined with another trend, the marketing downward of "good taste," to create a plague of consumers who descend every weekend upon University Village, Pacific Place, and other temples of the new good taste. They might be called, collectively, Pottery Barn Nation. Having been trained at the Gap and Ikea, they now set their sights a notch higher on the price and design scale. They've got the money—now they want quality with a capital Q. Until now, purveyors of the finer things in life have always been something of a clannish secret, a kind of knowledge passed from generation to generation among Seattle's well-heeled families. An outsider would scarcely notice the abundance of plain brown boxes at a wedding shower, for instance, but a woman with the knowledge would recognize it as the trademark of Miller-Pollard and understand that the bride also "knew." The Seattle ethos required that you spent your money quietly and with taste. Flaunt your doubloons, indulge a penchant for Graceland-style decor, and you'd be harrumphed out of town. As evidence, I offer two words: Ken Behring.

But over the past 12 months, such taste has become an open secret. Old Seattle didn't give up its discreet knowledge. Instead, more than a dozen national upscale retailers invaded the city, intent on satisfying New Seattle's craving for affluent taste. Tiffany, Cartier, and Max Mara have set up shop at Pacific Place. W Hotels, a tastefully hip chain of "boutique" hotels catering to plugged-in twenty- and thirtysomething business travelers—the Pottery Barn of hotels—is scheduled to open its downtown Seattle location next month. A quartet of home specialty chains—Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Anthropologie, and Sundance—offer "lifestyle" furniture and housewares at University Village, creating a new niche of upscale home shop between the Ikea/Pier One level of affordability and the Miller-Pollard level of unsurpassed, and very expensive, quality. Perhaps nowhere is the change more apparent than in the northwest corner of U Village, where the old Ernst hardware and garden store has been replaced by a row of smart boutiques, including Abercrombie & Fitch (a.k.a. the fancy lad's Old Navy); Ann Taylor; the upscale kitchen retailer Williams-Sonoma; and Sephora, an exclusive perfumery whose only two other American outlets boast addresses in SoHo and Coconut Grove.

Like a late bloomer, Seattle has finally made it onto the national retail map. "National brands finally realized people don't wear mukluks and live under umbrellas out here," says J'Amy Owens, president of the Retail Group, a Seattle-based retail consulting firm.

Those who lured these shops to town explain that they're filling a void in the shopping life of the city. "Our market doesn't have, for instance, the density of home furnishings that other markets do," says University Village general manager Jennifer Severson. "We've got [the shops along] Western Avenue, but there's no Crate & Barrel, no ABC Carpet and Home, and only one Ethan Allen." Matt Griffin, managing partner of Pine Street Development (which created Pacific Place) and a co-owner of University Village, talks about the opportunity to purchase a Max Mara coat or a Tiffany bracelet as a right the city had for too long been denied. "It wasn't fair that Seattle people had to get on a plane and go to Chicago, San Francisco, or New York to go to those shops," says Griffin. "They deserve to have those shops in their backyard. They deserve to have those choices."

But they're doing something more than merely filling a void. They are, for better or worse, changing the culture of Seattle. A little of the city's humble character has vanished. It's not enough to buy a pretty necklace, a comfortable chair, a useful lamp anymore. Now you've got to buy with Taste, and these national stores are happy to make the choice easy for us. A year ago a husband might have actually shopped for an anniversary necklace; asked around and maybe gone to Turgeon Raine or Fox's downtown instead of visiting his friend in the business, Mr. Shane. This year he doesn't have to ask. Whatever he gets will be fine—as long as it arrives in the robin's-egg-blue Tiffany & Co. box. At Turgeon Raine or Fox's (which already had, those with the knowledge knew, a Tiffany boutique), the affluence was quiet and implicit. At Tiffany it's displayed like an orange safety vest.