What it’s actually like
Fifth Avenue sells the West in small pieces: a turquoise ring, a hat, a postcard. Buffalo Collection sells it by the sofa. The showroom at 7044 East Fifth Avenue, just west of the Bronze Horse Fountain, is the flagship store and corporate office of a furniture company that makes sofas, sectionals, club chairs, recliners and ottomans in genuine American buffalo leather, and walking in from the sidewalk is like walking into a ranch lodge that happens to have price tags.
The leather is the argument. Buffalo hide is soft and pliable in a way that cowhide upholstery is not, and the company builds it onto hardwood frames with eight-way hand-tied springs and down-topped cushions, with hand braiding, lacing and fringed or woven accents on the more Western pieces. Its tannery uses a non-chromium “wet-white” process, a point the company makes about the environmental side of the trade. The collections carry place names, Colorado, Montana, Sedona, Ranch, Independence and a cleaner-lined Urban, and most of what sells is built to order rather than carried out the door.
Around the furniture is everything else a Western room wants: tanned bison robes, bison skulls bleached, carved, distressed or fur-covered, buffalo fur and hand-painted pillows, lamps, rugs, mirrors, handbags and journals, and Western art from painters, potters and photographers including prints of Edward S. Curtis. It is expensive, it is unapologetically rustic, and nobody minds a browse.
What to buy
A buffalo leather club chair. The piece that makes the case for the material, and the easiest to fit into a house that is not a lodge.
A custom sofa or sectional. The core of the business: built to your size, leather and trim, then shipped.
A bison robe or a skull. The statement piece for a wall or a bed, in a range of finishes from bleached to carved.
A buffalo fur pillow or a journal. The small purchase, and the one that fits in a carry-on.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The showroom is on Fifth Avenue a few doors west of the Bronze Horse Fountain at Marshall Way. Street spaces on Fifth are scarce; use the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal, or the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard, a flat ten-minute walk. The Old Town on foot note maps the route and the Fifth Avenue guide covers the rest of the street.
Hours are short and specific: Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 4, with Sunday and Monday by appointment and private viewings on request. That makes it a late-morning or early-afternoon stop rather than something to fold into an evening on the avenue. Nothing has to be carried home; custom orders and worldwide shipping are the norm, so come with measurements of the room if you are serious. The Downtown & 5th Ave guide covers the district, and the design showrooms of Wiseman & Gale Interiors on Marshall Way and Market by Modern Nest a few doors west are the natural comparisons if you are furnishing a whole house.
Eat while you’re there
Berdena’s and The Herb Box share the courtyard at 7051 East Fifth, across the avenue, for coffee and a patio lunch. Citizen Public House is the gastropub along Fifth, and FnB in Craftsman Court is the dinner if the day ends with a furniture order.
How it got here
Buffalo Collection began nowhere near Scottsdale. Its origin is Scenic Mesa Ranch in Hotchkiss, Colorado, a valley of organic farms, orchards and sagebrush under 13,000-foot peaks, where founder Julie Littlefield, a botanist by profession, set about restoring native buffalo range. The herd became a commercial buffalo meat business, the ranch built guest lodges, and Littlefield used the available hides to make furniture for them, pieces that could stand up to cowboys, hunters and dogs. With local artisans the ranch furniture turned into a full line of handcrafted American furniture and accessories, sold under the Buffalo Collection name.
At some point the company brought its corporate office and flagship store to downtown Scottsdale, and to the street that was always going to suit it. Fifth Avenue was cut in 1950 and spent the 1950s becoming the place winter visitors bought the West to take home; by the time Bob Parks’s Bronze Horse Fountain went in at Marshall Way in 1989, the avenue’s identity as a Western shopping street was settled. A Yelp review from 2013 already describes the store with a mounted buffalo head outside drawing people in, so the showroom has been part of the street since at least the early 2010s; the exact year it opened is not documented, and this page does not guess.
The company’s reach is national. In 2018 it was the official home furnishings sponsor of the 52nd Country Music Association Awards, and its catalogue sells to lodges, ranch houses and city apartments alike. The Scottsdale store is where the line can be sat in, which is the only way buffalo leather really sells.
On a street of jewelers, galleries and boutiques, Buffalo Collection is the outlier in scale and the most literal expression of the avenue’s old pitch. Fifth Avenue was built to sell the West to people with a second home nearby. Most shops sell them something to wear or hang; this one sells them the room.