Mother, daughters build business to keep family close

BONNERS FERRY - Soon after her family moved across the border from Montana, Shelly Yount peeped through the windows of Lindsay-Helmer Hardware and got hooked on the downtown building.

Just a girl at the time, she found everything about the place captivating. Wooden shelves ran nearly to the ceiling along the north wall - a perfect symmetry of rectangular storage spaces - with an attached ladder that could be rolled down their length, from a few feet inside the front door all the way back to the steps of the mezzanine.

Plank floors creaked pleasantly underfoot and the pulleys on the old hand-operated elevator made music as goods were transferred from floor-to-floor.

A generation later, the building she fell in love with remains virtually unchanged, except for the fact that its original shelves are now stocked with eclectic gifts and a popular lunchtime bistro draws a daily crowd to the back of the store for homemade meals.

This new incarnation, called Under the Sun, opened two years ago, soon after Yount and her husband watched the youngest of their three daughters graduate from high school. By that time, the hardware building had been sitting empty for more than seven years. It found new life when Kaylan, Kendall and Kynsie Yount - three attractive, intelligent young women in their early 20s - expressed a desire to keep family roots planted in Bonners Ferry.

“It's all been fate,” Shelly Yount said. “The girls all wanted to stay in town, so the idea started building and we started thinking: What would be good for their future? What could we all do together?”

The women in the family took inventory of individual strengths and areas of interest.

Kynsie, the youngest, had an eye for fashion and so gravitated to the clothing and accessory areas. Kendall exhibited a flair for decoration and working magic in the bistro, while Kaylan, the oldest at 24, managed the all-important bookkeeping functions while watching over her toddler daughter, Quinn, in the office with the help of her mother and siblings.

Settling into an antique church pew - a seat that receives the visitor with a friendly groan and crackle - the sweep of the store can be taken in from a cozy corner of the bistro. Kitchen goods, designer clocks, cast-iron cookware, garden ornaments, jeans, jewelry - an aesthetic tumble that keeps the eye on the move for the next colorful find.

“I think the merchandise mix comes from having three daughters who all have different tastes,” Shelly said. “We knew we didn't want to be a dollar store and we didn't want to be a tourist trap.

“It gets hard, in a small town, when you want to find a gift,” she added. “So we're really here for the community, for people who want to come in and love this old building.”

The Younts rented the downtown retail space for three months before the owner - a hometown boy who had plans to move his business into the building at some point - saw what they were up to, liked the look of things and agreed to sell the property. His biggest fear, according to the Younts, was that a buyer would come in and gut the place. But the mother and her daughters did just the opposite, leaving every shelf intact and infusing the long-vacant store with their energy and creativity until it fairly brimmed with good vibes.

The original skylight in the middle of the ceiling pours sunshine down onto the gardening gift area and back to the organic foods bistro, where homemade soups, breads and sandwiches have become so popular that the slow gift-buying months of winter are now easily carried by that part of the business.

Nary a nook and not a cranny has been left unused in Under the Sun's celebration of the historic retail space. And, for Shelly Yount, leaving the architectural details she remembers from her childhood in place has taken on the feel of a sacred quest.

“My husband wanted to rip out the bolt bins on that wall over there and I just about screamed,” she said, pointing to a covey of small, square compartments. “People love to come in and see things exactly as they were.

“Not only that - those bins will be perfect for wine storage,” she continued, adding that the shop plans to add beer and wine selections to the bistro menu and is considering coffee roasting as an addition to the organic espresso offerings it has now.

Having filled the 1,700 square feet of the main floor, the Younts - like artists before an empty canvas - have been eyeing the equivalently sized subterranean level.

“What's next? Who knows?” Shelly said. “But the basement is kind of itching at me.”

When the store opened on May 5, 2006, there were more people who thought the second anniversary would be marked by a return to vacancy than by any talk of expanding the floor space.

“We had our naysayers - a lot of people didn't think having all of this under one roof would work in Bonners Ferry,” said Shelly. “We're so thankful, every day, that people keep walking through the door. We're actually getting a lot of women coming from Sandpoint - in groups!”

As her daughters take turns greeting customers and preparing for the lunch crowd that will arrive within minutes, Shelly points out a few historical highlights.

“Those holes right there were drilled in the floor to let the floodwaters out from the 1948 flood,” she explained before walking to a black, metal display shelf in the middle of the sales floor. “That's how deep the water got,” she said, laying a finger on a white line and words painted 60 years ago about two feet above the floor that read, “High Water 1948.”

Still as enthralled by the former hardware store as she was the day she first pressed her nose to the window and looked inside, Shelly Yount has passed that love on to her daughters who, each in their own turn, have helped define its new personality.

The Old World boutique and bistro concept, dropped into this small-town Americana setting, has succeeded primarily on the efforts of the women behind it. But part of the success of this unique venture, according to Shelly Yount, can be attributed to the downtown storefront itself.

“This building has an energy of its own,” she said. “It already had a European feel. We just played that up with the merchandise we put inside.”