A demolition yard that found a retail customer.

Hechinger began with demolition. In 1911, according to the Washington historian John DeFerrari, writing in his Streets of Washington newsletter in February 2025, Sidney L. Hechinger founded the Sidney L. Hechinger Housewrecking Company, based at 6th and C Streets in Southwest Washington. The firm took down old buildings around the city and sold the salvaged material from its yard, and DeFerrari, drawing on the company records held by the DC History Center, writes that Hechinger soon noticed how much of that material was going to individual homeowners rather than to contractors.

The retail business followed. English Wikipedia dates Hechinger’s first hardware store to 1919, in Southwest Washington, and John Kelly of The Washington Post placed it at Sixth and C streets SW in a 2006 column. DeFerrari quotes a 1919 Evening Star advertisement for the demolition of a mansion at 15th and I Streets NW that offered doors, mirrors, lumber, bathtubs and radiators under the slogan “Changer of the City’s Skyline”. The same year, he writes, Hechinger leased the site of the former Camp Meigs on Florida Avenue NE for a branch lumberyard beside the railroad yard.

Advertising was part of the business from the start. DeFerrari describes newspaper pages filled with Hechinger offers in the 1920s, with construction materials sold “at rock-bottom prices”, and quotes an advertisement explaining that manufacturers with surplus stock would sell cheaply to a buyer who paid cash and bought in quantity. Wikipedia, citing a 1997 Washington Times account, says Sidney Hechinger chose in 1924 to serve retail customers rather than contractors and builders.

In 1930, DeFerrari writes, the company moved its headquarters and main store to a large complex at the meeting of Maryland Avenue, Florida Avenue and H Street NE, with lumber warehouses, a stockyard and a railroad spur. It stayed there until the late 1970s, when the head office moved to Landover, Maryland, and the H Street site was redeveloped as the Hechinger Mall. By the late 1990s, reports in the Los Angeles Times (1997) and The New York Times (1999) described the company as based in Largo, Maryland.

Family management, new formats and a 1997 sale.

The business then passed to the next generation. DeFerrari writes that in 1946 Sidney sold a third interest in the company each to his son John W. Hechinger and his son-in-law Richard England. Wikipedia, citing The Washington Post of 28 June 1953, says the company was reorganised in 1953, with John and Richard England as partners and the business divided into a retail hardware company and a wholesale building-supplies firm called Richard England Associates. Kelly’s 2006 column says the two took over in 1958.

The store format changed in the 1950s. DeFerrari describes the Tenleytown branch that opened in 1958 at 4555 Wisconsin Avenue NW, in a former Giant Food store with rooftop parking, where customers pushed shopping carts through the aisles and paid at a row of registers at the front, as in a supermarket. Rather than cutting a ribbon, he writes, Hechinger openings featured a lumber-cutting ceremony, a company tradition. The company went public in 1972, according to both Wikipedia and DeFerrari, and in 1981 Richard England told The New York Times, as DeFerrari quotes him, “We’re catering exclusively to the do-it-yourselfer.”

The third generation arrived in 1986, when John Hechinger Jr. was named president, according to Wikipedia, citing The Wall Street Journal. In December 1987 Hechinger offered to buy Home Quarters Warehouse, a Virginia Beach chain set up in 1984 by W.R. Grace & Co., which ran as a separate division until it was consolidated with Hechinger in August 1995, Wikipedia says. DeFerrari describes a Hechinger Home Project Center opened in the former Sears store on Wisconsin Avenue, staffed with project specialists and interior designers. In 1997, Wikipedia says, the company tried smaller concepts called Better Spaces in Albany, New York, and Wye River Hardware & Home in Wheaton and Rockville, Maryland; a Washington Business Journal headline of September 1997 noted that the Hechinger name was left off the new concept.

In 1997 the Los Angeles investment firm Leonard Green & Partners agreed to buy the company and combine it with Builders Square, then a subsidiary of Kmart; the Los Angeles Times reported in August 1997 that the two purchases were to close together, and Wikipedia dates the completed sale to September 1997. Hechinger filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware in June 1999, and its assets were liquidated from September 1999.

Design and documentation.

A home-improvement store brand is carried by more than a logo. It sits on a tall roadside sign meant to be read from a moving car, on the fascia above the entrance, on shopping carts and on the aprons and name badges worn by the staff who walk the aisles. It is printed on weekly circulars and newspaper inserts, on paint-can labels and on the stickers and tags that mark what is on sale.

Many of these chains grew out of lumber yards and hardware counters, and the yard side of the business left its own marks: names stencilled on delivery trucks, stamped on bundles of wood and painted on the sheds where contractors loaded up. When a chain changes owners, closes or is folded into another company, those objects tend to outlive it, turning up in old advertisements, archived photographs and the memories of shoppers.

Each guide in this group looks at one store name: who started it, who owned it over time and what became of it, and how its signs, ads and printed matter presented the store to the people who shopped there. The colours shown are our own reading, not an official specification.

A stencilled logo and two homeowners.

In March 2006 John Kelly of The Washington Post reported that Home Decor Products, a New Jersey e-commerce company run by Michael Golden, had acquired the Hechinger trademarks from Fleet Bank in Boston, the bankruptcy trustee that held the brand, and had opened an online hardware store at hechinger.com some five months earlier. The purchase, Kelly wrote, included the “distinctive stenciled-letter Hechinger logo” and the company motto.

It also included two characters. Kelly identified Harry and Harriet Homeowner as Hechinger’s do-it-yourself mascots, and Golden told him that Home Decor Products owned them too and planned to use them in its marketing. Golden said the idea came from remembering Hechinger stores from growing up in Philadelphia, and John Hechinger Jr. told Kelly that the family was flattered that people held the name in high regard. Wikipedia says the site’s closure was announced on 5 February 2009.

In 1990 the writer Jeanne Marie Laskas described “the Hechinger Experience” for The Washington Post Magazine; as DeFerrari quotes her, she noticed that the handles of all the paint cans were flipped in the same direction, that the tools were set out “like pretty little pastries”, and that she was soon filling an orange basket.

For a design guide, Hechinger shows how a regional store name carried by a stencilled logo, a lumber-yard motto and a pair of cartoon homeowners kept enough recognition to be bought and relaunched years after the last store closed. Compare it with Builders Square, the Kmart chain it was combined with in 1997, and The Home Depot, the warehouse format it competed against. For this guide we use basket orange, lumber tan and ink brown with a stencil sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hechinger’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.