It’s wine time at Petit Philippe’s new home
February 29, 2024
The wine shop finds a chic new storefont on Park Road.
by Michelle Boudin
Casey Hickey and Mark Meissner have spent their adult lives transforming eyesores into eye-catching, buzzworthy spaces. The new Petit Philippe Fine Wine flagship store on Park Road is the latest triumph for the husband-and-wife duo. Last fall, the couple opened the doors to the completely revamped space at the edge of Park Road Shopping Center.
Before they bought the midcentury-modern building, it was the longtime home to a popular dry cleaner. The downstairs space that once served as fur storage now holds customers’ wine collections and is home to a stylish private event space. Upstairs, rotating racks of clothing have been replaced with a chic retail store with ample seating for tastings and other events.
“Everybody that’s come in says that it feels really elegant, comfortable, spacious and beautiful. People are really blown away by the feel of the place,” Meissner says.
The 5,000-square-foot space allowed the owners to consolidate the Selwyn Avenue retail store they’d run for 13 years and a separate building where they stored customers’ wine.
“The whole breadth of our offering is wider and deeper because we have so much more real estate,” Meissner says. (A small satellite location in South End, previously home to Hickey’s chocolate boutique Twenty Degrees, remains open.)
Left: photograph by Peter Brentlinger. Right: Photograph of Mark Meissner courtesy Petit Philippe
The new shop features more than a thousand different wines, with an emphasis on bottles from France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Austria and the American West Coast.
The owners call themselves fine-wine merchants and clarify that Petit Philippe is not a wine bar. “But you can still come in here and have a glass, and hopefully you continue the wine journey and we can help you build a collection,” Meissner says.
The transformation of the building took an agonizing three years. “The project almost put me in the grave,” Meissner says, recalling the stress of construction and permitting costs and delays. “When you do anything in design that’s reuse, you just find things as you go.”
The move to the new building was significant for another reason: After 13 years as a tenant, the couple finally own their building. “We wanted to have our own property and our own parking lot and the option to expand. Now we’re in this standalone building in this highly visible corridor.”
While many regular customers have followed them to their new home, the couple are also pleased by the number of new customers who’ve discovered Petit Philippe at the new location.
“That’s what gets us so excited,” Meissner says. “The visual appeal of the new space is important to us, but it’s ultimately about these beautiful relationships we have with our clients that extends beyond a bottle of wine. It makes me feel like all the stress and hard work was worth it… Now we have the opportunity to show them something new and take the relationship to the next level.” SP
Petit Philippe is located at 4001 Park Rd.
Featured photograph by Peter Brentlinger
