What it’s actually like
Fifth Avenue’s storefronts mostly sell what you can carry to the car: turquoise, tees, a print. Market by Modern Nest sells the things you have delivered. It is the retail arm of the Modern Nest design studio, a curated boutique of furniture, lighting, home goods and art at 7038 East Fifth Avenue, and it is a recent arrival — a 2020s addition to the street, by most accounts — and one of the few places on the avenue where the merchandise is a room rather than a souvenir.
The look is the studio’s own: clean-lined furniture, considered lighting, textiles and objects that read as collected rather than stocked, and an on-site gallery of art that is actually for sale rather than there for atmosphere. It is a designer’s edit, which means it is opinionated. You will either want to move in or you will not, and both reactions are the point of a shop like this.
Because it is a design studio’s storefront, the staff can talk about a piece the way a salesperson at a furniture chain cannot: where it goes, what it sits with, what the room needs instead. Hours run Tuesday through Saturday, ten to five, which tells you it is a working boutique and not a tourist stop open until the bars close.
What to buy
A piece of art from the gallery wall. The on-site gallery is the easiest thing to walk out with and the thing most visitors do not expect on Fifth Avenue — original work, priced to sell, hung as it would be in a house.
A lamp or a light. Lighting is where a designer’s eye shows most and where a good boutique earns its margin. It is also the one piece of furniture that fits in a carry-on.
Objects and home goods. Vessels, textiles, the small things that make a shelf — the studio’s taste at gift prices.
The furniture, with a plan. If a sofa or a table stops you, ask about delivery and about the studio itself; the market is the front door to a full design practice.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The address sits on the curve of Fifth Avenue west of Scottsdale Road, in the heart of the Fifth Avenue shops. Street spaces on the avenue go to regulars and vanish in high season; use the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal, or the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and the seven-minute flat walk the Old Town on foot note describes. If you are buying anything larger than a lamp, ask about delivery before you worry about the trunk.
Tuesday through Saturday, ten to five, is the window — closed Sunday and Monday, so a weekend visit means Saturday. January through April is when the avenue is at its liveliest and the boutique is busiest with winter residents furnishing second homes; summer weekdays are when you get the floor and the staff to yourself. Thursday’s ArtWalk on Marshall Way, a block east, runs after the shop closes, so treat the two as separate outings. The Downtown and Fifth Avenue guide covers the rest of the district.
Eat while you’re there
Berdena’s is the closet-sized coffee bar around the corner in Craftsman Court and the right start. Citizen Public House on the avenue is lunch, with the famous chopped salad. FnB in Craftsman Court is the most decorated restaurant in Arizona and the dinner reservation to build the day around; Cartel Roasting Co. holds the far end of the street for a second coffee on the way back to the garage.
How it got here
Fifth Avenue was laid out in the early 1950s as the young town’s curving shopping street for tourists and winter residents, and for its first decade it was as much about homes as about souvenirs. Lloyd Kiva New’s Kiva Craft Center sold hand-screened textiles and resort wear from 1955; Craftsman Court, built the same year, housed the potters, weavers and silversmiths whose work furnished the ranch houses going up across the Valley. The avenue was a design street before it was a gift street.
That changed over the following decades as the tourist trade took the storefronts, and by the 1990s Fifth Avenue meant turquoise, tees and the Bronze Horse Fountain. What it had lost was exactly the thing Market by Modern Nest brings back: a place on the avenue where the merchandise is the room itself. The store is the retail arm of the Modern Nest design studio, and its arrival — recent, by most accounts a 2020s addition to the street — put a furniture and lighting boutique with a working gallery back on the avenue that once had several.
The model is a design studio’s storefront: a curated edit of furniture, lighting, home goods and art that functions both as a shop and as a shop window for the practice behind it. It is a form that Marshall Way’s galleries understand and one that Fifth Avenue’s gift-shop economy had mostly forgotten. The neighbor that best explains it is Wiseman & Gale Interiors, the Marshall Way design house that has kept a browsable showroom in front of a design firm since 1965; Market by Modern Nest is the same idea, sixty years younger and considerably more casual.
Whether it becomes a fixture is the open question every new Fifth Avenue tenant faces, and this page will not pretend to know. For now it is the address on the curve where a visitor can buy a lamp, a painting and an opinion about the room they belong in, a few doors from the jewelry cases that descend from the Kiva Craft Center and a short walk from the galleries of the Main Street Arts District.