Washington Consignment Closes, Still Owes People Money

Arlene Reba, 74, stood outside Nest, a new consignment shop on Wisconsin Avenue NW in Tenleytown, and peered in. The place was closed, but Reba caught a glimpse of an employee inside the store. The employee ducked out of sight and waited for Reba to leave.

Reba, it turns out, had a history with the people running Nest. The man behind Nest is John Coon, an entrepreneur who specializes in opening and closing consignment shops. Coon ran the recently shuttered Washington Consignment in Cleveland Park and operated another store by the same name on Wisconsin Avenue before closing it more than a year ago. Another Coon consignment store on Nicholson Lane in Rockville closed in August.

Per his travels in the second-hand-sales biz, Coon has attracted a coterie of regulars, with Reba among them. At Washington Consignment in Cleveland Park, Reba was “a friend of the store,” according to Coon. But the two have had a falling-out since Washington Consignment began going under. Reba lost trust in the store, where she knew all of the employees and had done business for several years. Others who claim they should have been paid and weren’t or were paid too little too late echo her concerns.

The Cleveland Park store closed Sept. 28. “We went insolvent,” says Coon, who sometimes lists himself as the store owner but is in actuality the president of a board of a directors of a company that owns the store, he says.

“It was a victim of the economy,” says Coon of his latest closed store. He needed out of an expensive Connecticut Avenue lease, and when he realized he was not taking in enough money to cover expenses—including paying his consigners—he decided to have a big sale, close up shop, and sell the store’s Web site and e-mail list to a new corporation, which owns Nest.

At Nest, he has combined all of his endeavors, making it one-stop shopping for cleaning services, painting, interior design, home-staging, and event- and wedding-planning. He turned an old rug store that, he says, “everyone told me had been going out of business for 20 years” into a brightly colored gallery of other people’s furnishings, complete with a parrot named Pedro.

The sale of the Web site and the proceeds from the new store are helping him to pay his old consigners, he says. But some of his old consigners feel they are getting a bad deal. Among those who’ve come forward, Reba was owed the most.

Reba, a retired teacher and travel broker who finds items at estate sales and the like and then consigns them, was offered store credit in lieu of a check from Washington Consignment for more than $2,000. She took it, she says, “because I figured if they closed, I would have nothing.” She picked out a 1920s-era Chinese emperor’s robe, a Japanese wedding coat, and a few small statues. “All of it had to be carried out,” she says.

Reba felt her account had not been zeroed-out; Coon says it was and then some. When Reba went in again a few days later, she spied a bronze panther someone had recently brought in. “I loved it,” she says of the small sculpture by artist Loet Vanderveen. She owned another work of his, a bishop sitting in a rocking chair, “and I had never seen another piece by him” before the panther showed up.

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