New businesses brighten your day

A new dog is greeting visitors entering La Conner.

Rowdy Dog Antique Lighting, in the Tillinghast building at Morris and Maple, is one of a dozen businesses to open in town since last fall.

It’s also one of two businesses that trace their roots to Mary Davis Lighting.

“I knew Tom before Tom knew Mary,” said co-owner Paul Shong of Davis and her late partner Tom Minfie. A retired welder-mechanic, he often helped Davis and Minifie with tricky restoration assignments. He can repair Tiffany-style lamps using his extensive collection of vintage glass and his skill in bending glass – or he can update them with modern sockets and wiring.

The vintage lighting expert focuses on lighting from the Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts and Art Deco eras. Shong and his wife Jennifer opened their store in July after many years of selling lighting to antique dealers from their home in Edmonds. The store is named for the beloved basset hound they lost two years ago.

Walking into the store, customers encounter gorgeous vintage lamps and his striking wooden workbench: the 1880s interior of the post office in Trident, Montana.

The Shongs often send customers to Mark Joseph Kulseth, owner of La Conner Electric Company at 512 South First Street. Also a longtime friend of Davis and Minifie, he worked with Davis following Minifie’s death in 2018 and bought much of her inventory when she retired.

Kulseth, too, refers customers to the Shongs, because their inventory and skills overlap only about 15 percent. Like Paul Shong, Kulseth repairs and restores lighting, but his specialty is making custom lampshades. His store carries ready-made lamp shades as well as fabric for shoppers on the hunt for custom shades.

At a thousand shades a year, he estimates he has made more than 20,000 shades, under the name Mark Joseph Design.

“Many were for top Northwest designers whose clients are in the top half-percent economic bracket,” he said. His shades for the homes of billionaires often turn up in design magazines.

Kulseth also creates lighting fixtures for conference rooms and other business settings. “Architects show me a scratch pad or drawing and I’ll come up with it,” he said.

In Seattle, where he had a workroom for 23 years, he had dumpsters outside his door. From his new studio and retail space, he looks out over the channel.

“My lifestyle has improved,” he said.

Shannon Carpenter did not know Mary Davis, but the proprietor of La Conner Flower and Gifts at 623 South First Street says she has never felt so welcome in a town before.

Owner of two previous floral shops and a former manager of retail floral departments and a garden center, Carpenter says she has done everything in her 45 years in the floral business except go to South America and grow the flowers.

Besides wrapped arrangements or floral vases, which she delivers free in La Conner or Shelter Bay, Carpenter carries cards, soaps and essential oils.

“Essential oils are parts of plants – their roots, bark and petals,” she said, noting that they have been used in Chinese medicine, including aromatherapy, for 5000 years.

Sales of her essential oils are so brisk, she may increase her selection – but meanwhile, she loves her field.

“Florists get to participate in some of the happiest occasions in life and some of the saddest,” she said.

“I’ve done weddings, funerals of police officers and for people who have lost children, arrangements for Bill Nye the science guy and even for caterers prepping dinner parties for Bill Gates ... athough he wouldn’t know who I am!”