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December 24, 1999/15 Tevet 5760, Vol. 52, No.17
Store offers eclectic mix of merchandise
CHRIS GARIFO
Staff Writer
With their varied backgrounds and expertise, it's little won- der that Aija Berzins, Elaine Morton and Deirdre Pain are partners in a store with an eclectic collection of household furnishings.
Add a dash of Mexico to the recipe, and you have Cabo Eclectica, a new custom furniture store in Scottsdale.
The store, 6824 E. Indian School Road, is the culmination of former real-estate agent Morton's decade-long dream of having her own showroom.
Pain, who owns Malee's on main, a Thai restaurant in Scottsdale, became involved as a result of her 12-year friendship with Morton. Berzins, who's been in the art-gallery business for 30 years, has known Pain for seven.
Cabo Eclectica opened its doors in mid-October, and had its grand opening Nov. 18. It offers custom built and designed furnishings in a range of styles, with an emphasis on what Morton, 62, calls "a sort of Santa Barbara motif," using ceramics, and fine iron and leather work.
Morton, a native of Phoenix who as a child attended Temple Beth Israel, initially became involved with ceramics manufacturers in Mexico about 10 years ago, when Macayo's restaurants asked her to find a quality mug for their margaritas. She had a prior business relationship with Steve Johnson, Macayo's owner, as a result of her real-estate career.
"In Mexico, the more you're down there, the more you love the people and ... the more contacts (you make)," Morton says. "That's primarily how I got involved. ... I got started with it through the ceramics, and then I met the iron people and the wood people."
Morton is the buyer, and Berzins, 49, takes care of the day-to-day operation of the showroom.
Berzins, who worked at the now-closed O'Brien's Emporium in Scottsdale and was a former partner in the Berzins and Roberts art gallery (since renamed the Vanier Fine Arts gallery), says switching from the art-gallery world to custom furniture sales wasn't difficult.
"You've got a product you're selling, even though the product is a little bit different," she says.
Berzins, whose parents came to America from Latvia just after World War II, moved to the Valley from Indianapolis in 1976.
She says the Cabo showroom has a good, corner location on the northwest corner of Indian School Road and 68th Street.
"It's not right in the heart of Fifth Avenue shops where, although that's nice, you sometimes get lost among all the old shops," she says. "Being right on the corner and having signs on both sides, we've had a lot of people just stop because they saw signs."
Restaurateur Pain, 53, says business is "going well" at the store.
"The feedback we're getting from people is this isn't like anything else that they've seen in town," says Pain, whose husband of seven months, Jack, is also a partner in the store.
Pain first moved to the Valley in 1965 from Washington, D.C., to attend Arizona State University.
She says she experienced real culture shock when she first arrived in Tempe: "There were cowboys and surfers (there), and that was about it. And I wasn't either of those."
After graduating with a degree in social work, she returned to Washington for a few months before moving to the Valley permanently. She was a social worker here, and from 1976 to 1983 was a child-welfare worker at Jewish Family and Children's Service.
Pain says she and Morton talked about opening a furniture showroom for years, but it was the addition of Berzins to the discussions seven months ago that made their plans possible.
"I have another business (Malee's), and Elaine needs to be going back and forth to Mexico, (so) finding someone who was willing to and interested in running the showroom was really the key, because I can't do it and Elaine can't," Pain says.
Pain says Cabo Eclectica provides custom-made furnishings at a price many people can afford.
"What we want to do is create that niche where you can have your custom, quality furniture, but you don't have the Roche Robois prices on it," she says, adding, "I think there's so much that's the same out there that people really are looking for something a little more unique, something that stands them apart."
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