Restoration Hardware's Reboot: From Catalog to RH

Oct 10, 2026 / Oct 10, 2026 · 7 min read · restoration-hardware brand-history direct-mail ·

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A Hardware Store That Decided to Become Something Else

Stephen Gordon started Restoration Hardware because he could not find the parts for his own house. According to RH's investor relations page, Gordon was restoring a Queen Anne Victorian in Eureka, California, and after "spending days tracking down authentic period hardware, lighting fixtures and finishes," he concluded that other restorers faced the same problem. He opened the first Restoration Hardware store in his home in 1980; the company dates its founding to 1979.

More than four decades later, the company that grew from that store trades on the New York Stock Exchange as RH, runs large furniture galleries, and still sells through printed catalogs, now called Source Books. The route between those two points ran through a near-collapse, a private-equity buyout, a second stock-market listing and a change of name, and the catalog survived every stage of it.

From one store to a public chain

Growth came slowly at first. The Wikipedia history of the company records that Restoration Hardware expanded in Northern California and Boston before raising outside capital from Cardinal Investments, which let it speed up. It had 47 stores when it went public in 1998 and more than 65 by the end of that year. By 2001 it ran over 100 stores in 31 states, with $369.5 million in net sales.

Wall Street then lost patience with it. In March 2001 the Los Angeles Times called Restoration Hardware a "quirky home store chain" that had "gone from market darling to Wall Street dud" in two years, and reported that it was bringing in former Williams-Sonoma president Gary Friedman, "long known as the brilliant merchandiser behind Williams-Sonoma and Pottery Barn stores," to run it.

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The turnaround

Friedman's own account, given to the San Francisco Chronicle, is that he called Gordon about a company he had once studied as an acquisition target at Williams-Sonoma, whose stock "had gone from $37 per share to 50 cents per share" and which was close to bankruptcy. He brought a record of building chains: when he joined Williams-Sonoma it had, by his count, "40 to 50 (Williams-Sonoma) stores and about 20 Pottery Barn stores," and in 1992 its chief executive made him president of both. RH's investor page describes what followed: from 2001, under Friedman, Restoration Hardware "began to reposition itself from a nostalgic, discovery items business to a leading home furnishings brand."

The founder moved on. In 2005 Gordon left to run Robert Redford's Sundance Catalog Company, and in 2007 Sears Holdings bought 13.7% of Restoration Hardware's shares, which led to talk of a takeover. The housing crash came first. In 2008 the company closed stores, among them the original in Old Town Eureka, and in June of that year it was taken private by investment funds affiliated with Catterton, Tower Three and Glenhill, according to RH's investor page. RH says the private years were when it "accelerated the transformation of its brand and development of its multi-channel business model." Sears had been expected to play a part; the buyout closed without it, and Catterton took the company private on June 18, 2008. Going private removed the quarterly scrutiny that had followed the chain since its first listing, at the moment it was rebuilding what it sold. The same year it launched a baby and child line, a second customer for the catalog business alongside the adult home.

Restoration Hardware becomes RH

From September 2010 the company described a move "up-market", toward furniture galleries at higher prices that would set it apart from competitors such as Pottery Barn, and stores began adding the word "Gallery" to their names. Restoration Hardware Holdings returned to public markets with an initial public offering on November 1, 2012, priced at $24.00 a share, and "effective January 1, 2017, Restoration Hardware Holdings, Inc. changed its name to RH," per the company's investor page.

Leadership did not move in a straight line during those years. In August 2012, shortly before the offering, Friedman stepped down as chairman and co-chief executive after an internal inquiry into a relationship with a 26-year-old employee, The New York Times DealBook reported. Less than a year later the Los Angeles Times reported that he had returned as chairman and co-CEO. When co-CEO Carlos Alberini left in 2013 to run Lucky Brand Jeans, Friedman became sole chairman and chief executive.

The catalog that got heavier

Through all of this the catalog stayed, and grew. RH renamed it the Source Book, and its size became news in its own right: Time magazine criticized a 992-page edition for the paper it consumed, and the full 2014 mailing weighed 17 pounds and ran past 3,000 pages with all of its source books combined. The company replied that combining its separate books into one package reduced its carbon footprint; critics still called the mass mailing wasteful.

The format also turned into a way to launch whole product ideas. RH created a small-spaces line in 2012, and its 2014 Small Spaces source book showed 18 smaller homes in the United States and Europe. In 2013 it released an Objects of Curiosity source book of artifacts and unusual décor, the same year it introduced tableware. Each one worked the way specialty catalogs always have: a separate book for a separate customer, mailed to people who had asked for it.

Galleries instead of stores

The stores changed as much as the catalog. On March 7, 2013, RH opened a gallery at 234 Berkeley Street in Boston's Back Bay, in the former Museum of Natural History building. The Boston Globe's preview described a two-year renovation that stripped out later mezzanines and elevators to open up 40,000 square feet under the original vaulted ceiling. The next year an Atlanta gallery of 70,000 square feet added a 50-foot pool.

Art and food followed. The 2013 Museum of Modern Art show "Rain Room", The New York Times' T Magazine noted, was a work Friedman had commissioned for a new RH art division. In 2015 RH opened its first restaurant, the 3 Arts Club Café in Chicago, and it now runs 14 restaurants inside its galleries. In 2022 it opened the RH Guesthouse hotel in New York, and in June 2023 its first gallery outside North America, at Aynhoe Park in Northamptonshire, England, on 73 acres with three restaurants. In Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Business Journal reported, RH turned Linden House, the former home of the late philanthropist Christel DeHaan, into a showroom and restaurant that opened to the public on November 17, 2023.

What the reboot still owes the catalog

Across all of those changes, the part of RH that stayed is the catalog. Gordon's first business was sourcing: finding period fixtures and offering them to a narrow audience with one specific problem, which is the job a specialty catalog has always done. The Source Book is the same instrument at a larger scale, a printed object a customer requests and keeps, meant to be read before anyone visits a gallery.

The company was rebuilt twice, from a hardware store into a furniture brand and from a store chain into a gallery and hospitality business, and the printed book went with it both times.