Oct. 13,2002 By JOY LEIKER Hays Daily News
PLAINVILLE — Chuck Comeau isn't new to the role of a visionary.
A lifelong area resident, he made a revolutionary career change from petroleum geologist to interior design executive years ago. Now, he's taken a vivid interest in decorating and transformed it into somewhat of a rural empire of collaborative design companies — Dessin Fournir, Classic Cloth, C.S. Post and Co., Gerard and Palmer Hargrave.
Dealing in exclusive fabrics, one-of-a-kind lighting fixtures, furniture and
original home accessories for designers, decorators and architects, Comeau's
businesses are showcased in 16 showrooms in the centers of the country's largest
cities. C.S. Post and Co., 117 W. 11th, a general store in downtown Hays,
and the business' accompanying Web site, www.cspostandco.com, are his only
retail enterprises.
Thirteen fabric mills in nine countries weave fabrics for his companies' designs, but Comeau said the businesses hold one advantage that are unbeatable by any competitors — a home in western Kansas. All the corporate offices are based in downtown Plainville. Some of those offices, warehouses and factory floors had been in metropolitan cities, but Comeau opted to bring all baseline operations back to his hometown of about 2,000 residents. Seventy of his 106 employees work from offices in Plainville.
“About the time we moved everything back here, it was the time the oil economy went down the toilet again and probably for the last time. A lot of companies just pulled out. They just left,” he said. “We had personal friends that were very talented” and out of a job.
A husband and father of three children, Comeau said his own appreciation of his hometown has grown over the years. It's also something he and his wife, Shirley, owner of her own 27-year-old home decorating store, The Pineapple Post, want to pass along to their children. “If my kids ever wanted to move back to Plainville after they got their education, there has to be something to stem the tide of there being nothing here for them,” he said. “They won't have the luxury of living here.” In Comeau's eyes, having a Plainville address, or that of any small Kansas town, is just that — a luxury. “We've had lots of opportunities to leave, but the reality is this is where we wanted to stay,” he said.
During a tour of his downtown buildings, all saved from dozens of coats of
paint and restored to their simplistic, backbone beauty, a child riding down the
street on his bicycle yells, “Hi Chuck,” at the top of his lungs. Drivers
honk their horns, not because of bumper-to-bumper traffic or even a slow-moving
tractor, but instead to nod hello.
“It's a very nice way of life — fairly protected, very safe. We're really able to mitigate many of the problems people have when they live in the larger cities. The nice thing for us and many of the people who work here is that they all have some level of travel in their work, but we get to come home here to Plainville,” he said. The warm and fuzzy feeling of small-town living is good for Comeau, and it's turned into perhaps the best marketing tagline he ever could have dreamed. Clients remember the business' style, as well as its unusual address as “that one in Kansas.”
Writers and editors from across the country have noticed, too. The C.S. Post store and its Web site have won accolades from the industry since the store opened in 1998, and this summer a team from Interior Design, a New York magazine, visited Plainville to see what all the fuss was about. “They were absolutely in awe to think that we live this way,” Comeau said. “They thought everybody was no nice. When they saw the fact that we're out here — out here in the middle of Timbuktu, it was more of a curiosity.”
Comeau shares a bit of that same curiosity, but not with why working from Plainville makes perfect sense. He's gutted and remodeled some of the community's oldest downtown buildings to chic grandeur. The company's primary office space is housed inside a former auto dealership. A garage door in the rear was used as an entry point and cars were driven into the building's basement, a safety refuge during the Cuban missile crisis. Restoring the building meant exposing, not hiding, the structure's concrete floors, brick walls and wooden roof. A former clothing store, meat locker and oil-field truck shop all have been transformed into similar avant garde storefronts in downtown Plainville.
“Part of these reconstruction, renovation projects we do, you kind of have to pick it apart, look at what's there and ‘How do I put that back together and do that attractively.' That's the hardest part,” he said. “Once we gutted it, we wanted to make it a fun, creative atmosphere,” he said.
In recent years, he's taken those same restoration and renovation ideas on the road — across the county line and just 22 miles to the south. The creator and catalyst of Hays' current downtown revitalization project, the Chestnut Street District, Comeau said he couldn't wait for someone else to save the regional hub's downtown district from disaster. “I had no business doing that, but I have this huge appreciation for beautiful things, and downtown Hays has beautiful buildings that they're not paying attention to,” he said.
There are no short-term solutions, and Comeau said that makes the work especially daunting. “It's extremely long term, and you have to be tenacious to do it. There's always the naysayers: the people who say we like it the way it is. But change is good,” he said. “The status quo is tempting, but I prefer to kind of shake things up; it makes you creative. It makes you think about what's going on.” Yet, the rewards are priceless. Just as he still remembers walking into a drug store as a child and “buying pistachios from the stupid turning wheel thing,” an investment in a community's downtown is a guarantee for future generations. “It's more about creating a sense of community, and that's something that my kids have never experienced. “I used to look at it and think someday I'm going to have a dollar and buy a whole bunch of pistachios — kids don't get to have that. To me those are the kinds of things that evoke memories that kids don't get anymore. They don't get to enjoy that,” he said.
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