Mark Hodesh bought Downtown Home & Garden–then Hertler Bros.–for $140,000 in 1975 “including all inventory and two trucks,” he says. A steal, right? Actually, Hodesh says, the old feed and grain store “at the time was considered a pretty bad investment,” but he had been looking at it for three years out the window of the Fleetwood Diner, which he started in 1972.

Hodesh liked the neighborhood’s rough, frontier feel. Warehouses and factories still bordered the nearby railroad, but already people like him–hip, young Baby Boomers–were colonizing the west side and rediscovering gardening, canning, farmers markets, food co-ops–things that, to their parents, had resonated unpleasantly of the Depression and wartime.

On January 1, Hodesh’s handpicked successor Kelly Vore will become the owner of Downtown Home & Garden, which Hodesh gradually transformed from farm store to urban garden store, from outfitting farm kitchens to foodie kitchens. Hodesh, seventy, will still own the buildings, and will continue to run Mark’s Carts and Bill’s Beer Garden (the latter in partnership with Bill Zolkowski, an old friend from Fleetwood days).

Hodesh comes from a literary family, and he tells his own story superbly–see his newsletter inserted in this issue–though he glides over the almost twenty years when he and his wife, artist Margaret Parker, were running the Castine Inn in Maine, and Hertler’s was being run into the ground as a too-faithful continuation of the store he’d left. In 1997, Hodesh sold the inn and came back to rebuild, though not as Hertler’s–he had lost the name and was unable to buy it back. (“And good luck trying to condense all that into a few sentences–I’ve never been able to.”)

Now DTHG is the anchor store–though Hodesh winces when he hears the comparison–of Ann Arbor’s little Brooklyn, a busy nexus of artisanal industries, organic and farm-to-table restaurants, and high-priced condos.

If Hodesh could have ordered up a backstory for his successor, it probably would have been Kelly Vore’s. A farm girl whose family owned a farm store, she left Morton, Indiana, at nineteen with one suitcase and $100. She landed on DTHG’s doorstep four years ago, applying for a job that paid $10 an hour. In between those two events was a highly successful career running REI stores, mostly in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest; followed by a temporary burnout; and a mini-career in social work. Now she lives with a partner on Ann Arbor’s west side.

Hodesh and Vore had instant rapport and overlapping expertise. Her REI past came in handy, she says, and “I solved some problems that had nagged at him.” But she credits Hodesh for DTHG’s recent expansion into clothing: “It was something Mark wanted to do as soon as Ehnis closed,” she says. (Ehnis & Sons sold Carhartt jackets and Red Wing work boots nearby until 2006.)

“Some people are great bean counters, but I get along by paying attention to our roots and the roots of the neighborhood,” Hodesh explains. He confesses that “among ourselves, we call it ‘playing store.’ It’s so simple. The back office is minimal. We buy things we enjoy. We give good service–we don’t dote or hover but like to wait on people promptly.”

Vore doesn’t plan any immediate big changes, but she doesn’t not plan on changing, ” ‘Change’ is business as usual. The store exists today because Mark is a risk taker who has made smart, assertive changes.”

Here’s Vore’s account of how Hodesh launched his latest change: “He invited me for dinner at his home. I said, ‘Um, OK’–he had never done that before. He’s a fantastic cook, by the way–I remember he made steak and a salad, then he asked me if I was interested in this proposition. He said, ‘I’ve talked it over with the girls [Parker and their daughter, Jeanne].’ He had a schedule all drawn up.”

As Hodesh tells it, the dinner proposal wasn’t completely out of the blue. “One day she passed the bread counter, and I said something like ‘Are you interested in running this place?’ and she said ‘Yes.’ That’s about all there was to it.”

Downtown Home & Garden, 210 S. Ashley, 662-8122. Mon.-Sat. 7:30 a.m.-7 p.m., Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

downtownhomeandgarden.com