Plainsman crafts a simple, sublime vision

PLAINVILLE, Kan. — This town on the Plains is an unexpected place to find high style.

Abandoned farm machinery and oil wells dot the wheat fields. You can count the restaurants on one hand and have fingers to spare: Dairy Queen, Pizza Hut and Taco Express.

But it’s the place Chuck Comeau — and his five luxury furnishing companies — call home, 280 miles west of Kansas City.

Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates and Elton John have purchased pieces from Comeau’s DessinFournir (“design” and “furnish” in French) businesses, headquartered in plush offices that once were a car dealership, trailer shop, meat locker and slaughterhouse. This year House & Garden magazine named Comeau a “New Tastemaker,” one of 50 individuals to watch nationwide in the design industry.

Now Comeau is combining his eye for design and architecture to transform more of northwest Kansas into a destination stop. The 48-year-old entrepreneur envisions downtown Hays, about 25 miles from here, as a place where motorists traveling between Kansas City and Denver will spend a few hours shopping or a weekend relaxing.

Comeau is renovating 25 buildings in Hays, population 20,000, once home to Wild Bill Hickok. His chic aesthetic has attracted other entrepreneurs, who have opened retail and service businesses in his renovated spaces.

The luxury furniture business and downtown revitalization are unusual for rural America, especially the Midwest. The Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development, located at Kansas State University, named Comeau one of their Leaders of the Year in 2004.

Sixteen-year-old Samantha Hixon creates DessinFournir catalogs for interior designers and furniture showrooms. The job is flexible, allowing her to work after school between cheerleading and volleyball practices.

“I would probably be working late nights at a fast-food restaurant or mowing grass if it weren’t for this job,” said Hixon, a junior at Plainville High School. “I know this usually doesn’t happen in a small town like this.”

Typically, new development heads to towns near geographic splendor, said Mary Hendrickson, an assistant professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “People go to the Rocky Mountains or the lakes of Minnesota,” she said. “They don’t usually spend their money in the remote part of a Plains state. So what’s happening is really special.”

Comeau sees beauty in rural Kansas. Not only does he admire the land, but he appreciates the friendly, down-to-earth people. He loves the fact that he can walk down the street and stop several times to talk to families because he knows so many of them.

“He surrounds himself with quality, trustworthy people, many of whom are locals,” said Mike Page, an agent for Farm Bureau Financial Services in Plainville. “His various businesses have helped turn Plainville around. Before, young families could not make a living and moved away — not because they wanted to, but because they had to. It was like the very slow death of a community.”

In Plainville, population 2,000, Comeau employs more than 65 persons. He’s in the process of acquiring a New York fabric company known for its colorful English motifs. The relocated company could add more jobs to the town, where a manufactured-homes business and DessinFournir are the largest private employers.

By making over nearby Hays, Comeau has created jobs for dozens more people who work in places like the brewpub that he opened this summer. He is investing in downtown, in part, because it’s where he and his wife, Shirley, own C.S. Post & Co., a general store that sells home furnishings and clothing — a concept he plans to eventually replicate in the Crossroads District of Kansas City.

“A downtown is the center of a community, the pulse,” Comeau said in a quick delivery that sounds more at home in New York than in rural Kansas. “When it dies, your town dies. I want my kids to experience something different from Wal-Mart and strip malls.”

Flatland entrepreneur

The furniture, fabric and light fixtures that Comeau designs for DessinFournir are sold only through interior designers at 15 showrooms in the United States and Canada. The most expensive piece, a bookcase, fetches $44,000.

His retail furniture line, C.S. Post & Co., recently made its showroom debut at Hudson Home, 1619 Walnut St. in Kansas City. Upholstered chairs and sofas sell for $2,000 to $5,000.

Sofia Varanka, co-owner of Hudson Home, sought out Comeau because she often had heard about DessinFournir’s luxury furniture when she lived in New York. She also was intrigued by the Plainville location. “I thought, ‘Who in the world would be in Kansas, and a remote part at that?’ ”

Comeau has been more successful than most other small-town entrepreneurs because he thinks big, said Ron Wilson, director of the Boyd institute. “He looks beyond northwest Kansas to the national and international markets,” he said. “We were impressed with his eclectic interests in design and business, combined with his educational background.”

Comeau, the youngest of six children, received an earth sciences degree from Fort Hays State University in Hays. The road that led him to being a designer was an indirect one. He worked as a petroleum geologist, rancher and banker. He developed entrepreneurial skills, working with family members in the oil industry.

With a self-taught knowledge of architecture and interior design, Comeau began to help friends and family with decorating in the 1980s. “My house is beautiful only because of him,” said his sister, Cathy Schaukowitch, a school nurse who lives in Olathe. “I just don’t have that gene. I would never buy something for my home without Chuck’s approval first.”

A design mecca

Through friends in California whose home he helped decorate, Comeau met businessman Len Larson, who wanted to start a furniture design business.

Founded in 1993, DessinFournir quickly earned a national reputation for making furniture that would fit in well with fine antiques. Real wood rather than thin veneer panels backed cabinets. Its craftspeople are trained in the art of polishing wood finishes, gilding, ebonizing, lacquering and chinoiserie, ornate decoration based on Chinese motifs.

Designer Jamey Bellamy of Delaware Interiors in Prairie Village remembers the first time she saw a DessinFournir piece in a showroom, a sleigh bed with an aged wood patina. “It was so refined and sophisticated that I fell in love with it,” she said. “It was so perfect in scale that it was spectacular.”

In the beginning years of DessinFournir, Comeau flew twice a month to Los Angeles to design and oversee manufacturing. The challenges of retaining employees in a city of Hollywood hopefuls and leaving home so often led him to a radical decision: Move the business to Plainville.

“People thought I was crazy, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened,” said Comeau. In 1999, DessinFournir moved to Plainville. “People here have a great work ethic, an innate loyalty that’s different from other places with more of a transient population.”

Comeau sent hometown friends to California for months to train in the art of finishing light fixtures with nickel and brass. Other people have become experts in fine textiles. They work at ClassicCloth, a company that handles and warehouses fabric designed in Plainville and manufactured in European mills.

He also hired friends who had left Plainville and Hays for jobs elsewhere. Troy and Michele Hixon had moved to Liberal, Kan., for an oil field job seven years ago. Troy Hixon now oversees showroom furniture installations. Michele Hixon works in customer service for ClassicCloth.

“This changed our lives,” Michele Hixon said. “It’s opened up a lot of doors for a lot of people who never could have dreamed about this opportunity.”

In the Plainville offices, located on Mill Street downtown, Comeau refuses to use computer-automated phone systems. Real people answer the phone. “The people are genuine and accommodating,” he said. “That niceness comes from living in a small town.”

Rebuilding Hays

The city of Hays is a waypoint for travelers on Interstate 70. The limestone and red brick buildings downtown date to the 1890s.

About half of the 25 buildings that Comeau is renovating have been completed, including the brewpub he opened in June, Gella’s Diner and Lb. Brewing Co. He designed the interior, which features murals interpreted from vintage photographs of farm life and Kansas homestead maps he found at a junk shop.

An avid cook who prepares his family’s meals as well as cuisine for company functions, Comeau created much of the menu himself. It features upscale versions of comfort food dishes, such as a tuna noodle casserole made with grilled tuna, fresh green peas and portabella mushrooms. The wait can be up to an hour.

“There was no dining experience in Hays before this,” said executive chef Tim Pfannenstiel, a former chef at Yahooz in Leawood and other Kansas City restaurants. “It was mostly fast food.”

Comeau’s work created space for a day spa with massage rooms in a dramatic cave-like atmosphere. There’s also a coffeehouse. A children’s clothing store is on the way. Two years ago, Tammy McClellan opened Simply Charmed, where customers choose elements of jewelry to be professionally assembled. It was among the first wave of businesses to open in space that Comeau had renovated.

McClellan, who initially had based her jewelry business inside her home, took the risk because she appreciated his building makeovers in Plainville: He stripped off fake exteriors, exposing original brick storefronts and wooden ceiling rafters. He jazzed them up subtly with industrial yet sophisticated light fixtures.“It looked so urban, kind of funny, but cool for places like Hays and Plainville,” said McClellan, who’s planning to expand her business.

Comeau is financing these revitalization projects mainly with his own money. A group of investors, including him, own the restaurant. Two grants from the Kansas State Historical Society have helped finance the renovations of two buildings.

The city center renewal has been a slow, steady turnaround through the years, said Hays City Commissioner Barbara Wasinger, who owns a title company with her husband downtown. But it’s been worth the wait, she said, because the new businesses and renovations of longtime existing businesses have added energy.

“It’s nice to have a person make such a significant investment,” Wasinger said. “Everyone who owns businesses downtown are working hard to make sure things keep improving. It’s starting to look like the quaint downtowns in the suburbs outside of Chicago.”

The changes inspired the Hays Public Library, built in 1911, to make major improvements. When director Melanie Miller arrived in 1982, buildings were obscured by plastic facades. Downtown businesses kept closing. The only life came from kids cruising Main Street.

“I think western Kansas is living up to a fuller potential,” Miller said. “The buildings haven’t looked this good in almost a century.”

Now people are shopping downtown. Some are even staying for weekend getaways. Besides retail shops, the renovations have spurred on industrial and technological businesses. The Planing Mill, completed this year, is manufacturing architectural elements for the buildings being overhauled and some of Comeau’s furniture designs. Nex-Tech, an Internet service provider based in Lenora, Kan., is moving 30 employees to downtown Hays because of the new life there.

“Our employees are younger, techie types, so environment matters to them,” said Justin McClung, an Internet solutions manager for Nex-Tech. “They want a fun place to work, and the restaurant and shops create that.”Eventually, Comeau would like to build loft hotels on the second and third floors of the buildings he’s renovating in Hays. He draws hope from other small downtowns he has seen rebound during his travels.

He recently heard some encouraging words from out-of-towners visiting the brewpub. “One said: ‘I’m in Kansas? I wouldn’t think so. This is so chic, so urban,’ ” he said. “But hey, why can’t you experience this in Kansas?”