Furnishing's Fever -- Success Of Stores Leads To Expansion Into Bellevue Galleria

BELLEVUE

After six years in Germany, Peter Bassiri returned to the Seattle area and bought a condominium. Trying to furnish it to his tastes wasn't so easy.

"I was going from one store to another to another," he recalls.

So he started his own store. Actually, two of them: Secrets, in downtown Kirkland, and Habits, near the Pike Place Market in Seattle. In the six years since Bassiri opened those shops, he's built a chain of seven Bellevue, Kirkland and Seattle stores that offer some of the region's most unusual and upscale home furnishings.

And, in what could be a prelude to expanding to other West Coast cities, Bassiri will open two stores in April in downtown Bellevue's most anticipated retail venue since the 1980s expansion of Bellevue Square: the Bellevue Galleria.

New Habits, relocated gallery

The stores will be a new Habits and a relocated Sahara Fine Arts Gallery. He also will operate a coffee shop in the Galleria's plaza on 106th Avenue Northeast.

With its 11-screen theater, video arcade, book and music store and three restaurants, the Galleria is expected to become a major gathering place.

Habits' target customer is younger people who are furnishing their first condo or small house - younger people with money.

Bassiri's stores all carry smaller items - candles, books of Zen wisdom and cookbooks - but what sets them apart are the big-ticket items that aren't found at other shops.

Unique, high-priced items

Secrets, for example, sells a Corsican twin bed with wrought-iron birds perching on branches for $2,700. Soho, which opened across Interstate 405 from downtown Bellevue two years ago, has such one-of-a-kind antiques as an antique Chinese apothecary ($2,950) and life-size Chinese terra cotta soldiers ($2,500 each), along with such modern luxuries as a Wright cherry table ($8,495).

Prices at Habits are somewhat lower and the furnishings more compact.

Born into an Iranian family that manufactures industrial and house paints, Bassiri was 14 in 1976 when his parents sent him to live with a friend in Seattle in order to advance his education.

He attended Ballard High School and Seattle University, where he was enrolled when he went into business for himself. It was about 1980 when Bassiri acquired bankrupt Seattle Cutlery. He usually worked the store until closing time, then studied at the university library and sharpened knives until early in the morning.

Retailing hasn't become easy.

"You've got to accept it and enjoy what it is. If you fight it and say, `Oh, God, this is the 64th week I'm working seven days a week, I'm tired of it, I can't do it anymore' - that's retail. You have to enjoy what you're doing, period."

Shortly after he opened Soho, Bassiri created Sahara Fine Arts to serve the demand for art and framing services. Over the past two years, the production area has grown from 2,000 square feet to 4,000 - and will leap to 8,500 when it moves to a large back room at the Galleria.

Retail extra: Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery, the first tenant at the Bellevue Galleria, will open for dinner March 8 and expand to the lunch hour March 22.

Expansion of Bartell Drugs' store at Crossroads Shopping Center will be complete next month. Bartell also is preparing to leave its 8,000-square-foot Kingsgate storefront and move into 13,000 square feet vacated by Jo-Ann Fabrics & Crafts last month.

Shop Talk appears on the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month.