If looking at great shoes makes something deep inside you just ache, then expect to feel a lot of aching inside the airy, sunlit walls of 1800 Baltimore. The adorably shaggy-haired John McClain opened Habitat with his wife, Kristen, plugging a gaping hole in a strip that is quickly becoming the Fashion District. With Spool, Birdies and three new hair salons on the block, one could easily sneak away over lunch, drop several hundred dollars, and come back to work looking like a million. All the space inside Habitat makes SoHo storefronts feel like claustrophobic thimbles by comparison, which means that Habitat has more cool stuff, many times over. Their list of brand offerings makes label whores drool: Freitag and Medium Design bags; shoes by Gola, Camper, PF Flyers, Fornarina, Farylrobin, Palladium and Seychelles; denim by Hudson, Earnest Sewn and 1921; and tees by Brown Sound, Lifetime Collective, Industry and Square. Plus, we saw a pair of white-and-mint Paul Frank sunglasses, and big lenses are still in. Is it lunchtime yet?
