“I don’t know what prompted Dr. Rahmani to move so quickly, but I couldn’t be happier at how things are playing out,” says Scott Hirth, co-owner of M-Den, which planned to vacate its Main St. address at the end of April. Easy for him to say–he’s got other stores to accommodate his inventory, and he’s expecting to be back in the space by Art Fair 2018, when a new and bigger M-Den and Victors Collection will occupy about two-thirds of the ground floor of the six-story building the city has approved for the site (the rest of the ground floor will be lobby).

For those who haven’t been following the saga, Reza Rahmani bought the single-story building, currently divided into three storefronts, as part of the Al Nalli properties in 2015. (Reportedly it’s not his latest Main St. conquest–that would be the Urban Jewelers/Footprints building, according to several sources who requested anonymity.) “We asked him if we could stay through the end of April for graduation,” Hirth says. Then “we’ll have a week to clean out” before demolition starts.

Inty Muenala of Native Kichwa Arts also had another store to fall back on. He spun his Ann Arbor gallery off from one in Novi’s Twelve Oaks mall in 2014, and he’s back to selling his indigenous American arts and crafts there.

Not so happy about the timing is Anna Czinski, who runs King’s Chosen, the furniture store founded by her parents James and Johanna Asztalos. On March 31, Anna had only hours to go on her Main St. lease, and as she packed up the final boxes, she spoke bluntly by phone of her exit. She says Rahmani visited her shortly after her father died in December saying, “Don’t worry, you’ve got two years, tops.” He came in a few months later and repeated there was no hurry–but in early February “he came in again, and said, ‘You’ve got eight weeks.'”

She adds that she has no nostalgia for the single-story structure itself: “It’s a junky building. It has no historic value. It’s cinder blocks, glass, and a leaky flat roof. The day my father was going into the hospital, a pipe broke,” and she had to quickly evacuate her office.

The break in Main St.’s two- and three-story skyline is there because it was the site of one of the block’s last surviving homes. Bertha Muehlig (granddaughter of funeral-home founder Muehlig and owner in her own right of a Main St. dry goods store now occupied by the law firm Hooper Hathaway) lived in a white Greek Revival house with a gracious landscaped lawn at 315 S. Main until her death in 1955. In the early 1960s the house was demolished, and a Glidden paint store was quickly slapped over the entire lot. It’s in the Main St. historic district but as a “non-contributing” building enjoys no protection.

Plans for the six-story replacement swiftly waltzed past the city’s various bureaucratic checkpoints, and not just because Rahmani is sailing with the prevailing wind from City Hall, which blows in the direction of greater density (and the higher property taxes that follow). It’s also a tribute to architects Mitchell & Mouat, who delicately threaded the needle between the historic and the contemporary by narrowing and offsetting the upper stories so they won’t overpower the street.

On April 1, unpacking boxes in King’s Chosen’s new home on W. Stadium, Anna wanted to paint a fuller portrait of her former landlord. “Mr. Rahmani was very kind to us during my father’s illness. My father liked him. He has a beautiful family. Mr. Rahmani bought furniture from us–being delivered today, actually–and wants to order more. Change is painful, but change is good,” she says resolutely. “Downtown had stagnated.”

(Anna, by the way, doesn’t use her last name with customers–it’s not even on her business card. “I go by ‘Anna King’s Chosen,'” she laughs. “My last name went from Hungarian to Polish, and no one’s ever been able to spell either of them.”)

People tend to shorthand King’s Chosen as the Amish furniture store, but Anna says, “We try to leave the word ‘Amish’ out of this–we don’t sell their furniture; we sell ours. We have a higher standard. We represent about eighty bench-built furniture makers”–many of whom happen to be Amish. “Bench-built” means pieces are constructed individually by skilled craftspeople rather than on an assembly line.

“We don’t work like a typical furniture store,” Anna adds. “We don’t warehouse, and everything is made to order.” A long time ago her family decided to specialize in the Mission style, because of the large number of Arts & Crafts-era houses in Ann Arbor, and because it beautifully showcases quality construction, but they’re not limited to that style.

Anna found the new location serendipitously. When Rahmani told her she had eight weeks to get out, she frantically got in her car and started driving. Looking for buildings for rent, “I pulled into Dimo’s to get something to eat.” On her way into the deli/donut shop, she noticed in the same mini-mall an empty storefront that’s been vacant since the Greenback Dollar Store closed in 2014. Inside, she encountered one of King’s Chosen’s oldest customers, who’d also come in for a sandwich, and took that as a good omen. “I said to myself, ‘Please tell me that space is available!'” she recalls.

She and Walid Dimo, who owns both the deli and the building, were immediately simpatico. She found a home for some old restaurant furniture of his that he was storing in the space, and “He cleaned the carpet, painted, let us move in early.”

Anna and her four siblings are now mainly running the business, though her mother is still around (she walked in with an apple fritter and coffee from Dimo’s and smilingly noted that her daughter was a good talker). King’s Chosen has countered the allure of the Internet by offering what the Internet can’t–attentive, on-site customer service. “I do a lot of house calls and work directly with them, rather than sending a catalog,” Anna says. “This is a service I don’t charge for. Customers get exactly what they need.

“You know how people say they like the Internet because they can shop in their jammies? Well, you can stay in your jammies. I’ll come to your house.”

King’s Chosen, 2026 W. Stadium, 332-0307. Hours: “working on those, but we don’t even put them on the website–they change seasonally.” kingschosen.com

from Calls & Letters, June 2017

Cindy Stein Nordlinger called to correct a mistake in our Marketplace Changes article about Reza Rahmani’s latest project on S. Main St. (“Miss Muehlig, Meet Dr. Rahmani,” May). “My dad used to own Stein & Goetz sporting goods,” Nordlinger explained in a voicemail message. “When it talked about Bertha Muehlig’s house being demolished and a Glidden paint store being slapped over the entire lot, that’s not correct. There were three stores originally: there was a Wurlitzer pianos store on the north, Stein & Goetz sporting goods in the middle, and then Glidden–Home Beautiful was the name of the store that carried Glidden paints.”

It was an error of very long standing: we’d relied on a Then & Now article published in December 1978. We appreciate the correction.