Museum Shops Worth the Trip

If great shopping gives you as much of a dopamine hit as great art, you just may want to build your next vacation around one of these museum stores.

- JENNIFER WILSON

MOCA Store

This Los Angeles museum's store exudes cool, with pieces like Pop Art bags, bubble vases, and an L.A. soy candle that smells of jasmine and redwoods.

The MOMA Design Store in New York and the Smithsonian gift shops in D.C. are almost as iconic as the museums they belong to. But the museum shop-lover in you doesn't have to stop at these widely recognized stores. We've compiled a list of some lesser-known yet stellar museum shops all over America, spots that are well worth planning a getaway around.

The Museum of Contemporary Art

Los Angeles

Both crowd-pleasing and unusual works of contemporary art hang in the galleries of MOCA's main Grand Avenue location. It follows then that the MOCA L.A. store is a fantastic spot for unusual gifts and keepsakes-think Kehinde Wiley bath towels and Henry Taylor skateboard decks, for example. If you're ready to move beyond the tote bag to purchase the real deal, you can even buy limitededition artworks from artists such as Jeff Koons. moca.org

National Nordic

Museum Seattle This gorgeous space dedicated to Nordic immigrants was designed with their heritage in mind, right down to the architecture, which borrows features from the fjords. The museum store lets you shop some of the greatest hits from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. Find bold Marimekko patterns in kitchen and housewares, organicshape Finnish-glass pieces designed by architect Alvar Aalto, and creative cutlery by Georg Jensen. nordicmuseum.org

Heard Museum

Phoenix