The Shop That Only Opens on Weekends
There’s a kitchen in the shop. That’s the detail I keep coming back to. Not the knitwear, not the horse-blanket bomber jacket, not the glowing write-ups. The kitchen, where someone makes martinis on a Saturday afternoon and offers you coffee or cake while you decide whether you're buying anything at all.
The shop is called Jake’s. It’s on the second floor of a plain building just off Cambridge Heath Road in East London, and it opens on weekends only. i-D visited for a September feature and called it London’s best store, which is a big claim for a room you have to climb stairs to find. I haven’t been yet. I’ve only read about it, and I’m already intrigued.
A living room with a clothing rack
Jake Burt opened it in late 2024. He’d been traveling to Korea and Tokyo, wandering through shops and cafes with real personalities, and on a flight back to London in the summer of 2024 he decided he wanted one of his own. According to i-D, the first version was a corner of an empty building near Old Street: about £400 of paint and a lot of help from his parents. Inside were the ideas that never fit Stefan Cooke, the label he built with his partner of 14 years. They finally had somewhere to live.
He started with a different name, then switched to his own because it felt more personal, like visiting somebody’s place. That’s the whole pitch, as far as I can tell. He wants you to feel you “walked into someone’s world.” The racks carry his cardigans and hoodies next to bags, handmade cards and accessories by friends, and every piece comes with a story. A horse blanket, from a horse that died after 18 years, became a bomber jacket. Nobody pushes. The afternoon takes the shape of whoever walks in.
Fame gets no shortcut either. At a New York pop-up, Burt refused to let an influencer skip the line. I’d like to shake his hand for that.
The irony is what came next. The New York Times profiled him earlier this year, and his New York pop-ups sold out. A place built on not hurrying now has a line. I don’t know what to do with that. Quiet things get found, found things get loud, and then the room has to decide whether it floods or learns to swim.
What a counter knows that a feed doesn’t
Skate shops used to work like this. So did surf shops. In Southern California the counter was the original social network: a guy on a stool who knew which break was working and which deck would snap by Friday. Supreme began as a single skate shop in lower Manhattan in 1994, and for years the room was the product. SoCal streetwear grew up in rooms like that, with wheels and wax on the shelves and a reason to stay.
Somewhere along the way we started treating the room as overhead. I used to think physical retail lost to convenience. Now I think it lost interest in being a place. Jake’s reads like the opposite bet: a small space, weekend hours, an owner who is actually there on Saturdays. No flagship, no theater. Someone’s home, open for a couple of days.
We don’t have a street or a staircase. What we have is a counter on a screen, and I want it to behave like Jake’s kitchen: quiet, a little warm, nobody leaning on you. Everything here is made when someone orders it, so there’s no rack to clear and no reason to rush anyone. If you’d like to see what we keep behind our own counter, the MCHNSM shop is open. Browse slowly. Leave empty-handed if that’s what the afternoon calls for.
The part I can’t resolve
Burt talks about opening more Jake’s in New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Melbourne and Los Angeles, each run by locals instead of as a flagship. i-D doesn’t say more about the LA version, and he treats the whole thing as a fantasy, so I’m holding it loosely. I want it to come here. I also know how quickly LA can turn a living room into a set. Both feel true, and I’m not going to pick.
Maybe the next good shop is two flights up in a building you’ve walked past a hundred times. Maybe it’s a kitchen table and a folding rack. Go find a room where somebody’s glad you showed up, and stay longer than you planned. Then tell us where it is.