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Gallahan's Home Furnishings' showroom in Spotsylvania County's Lee's Hill Commercial Center opened in 2001. |
BY CATHY JETT
"End of an Era" is emblazoned on the huge sign over the Gallahans of Fredericksburg's front door.
The area's largest furniture store, which drew customers from as far away as Maryland and North Carolina, is going out of business after 37 years of triumph and tragedy. It is liquidating its stock, and will likely close by the end of the month.
"Our business plan called for a 12- to 18-month turnaround effort, and although expenses were reduced and sales are up 8 percent this year over last year, Gallahans just simply fell short of our performance requirements," Jim Shrawder, whose company bought Gallahans almost two years ago, said in a prepared statement.
Severegn Furniture Management, which also owns Danker Furniture in Gaithersburg, Md., and Sheffield Furniture in the Philadelphia metro area, purchased some of Gallahan's Home Furnishings' assets from Stone-Lee Inc. for an undisclosed sum in January 2007, after Stone-Lee's credit dried up.
Severegn also acquired the lease on Gallahan's 82,000-square-foot showroom next to Lee's Hill Shopping Center in Spotsylvania County, and renamed the business Gallahans of Fredericksburg.
At that time, Shrawder said he hoped to save the struggling store. He projected Gallahans could reach $20 million in sales by last December.
According to an article in the trade publication Furniture Today, the current economic climate may have played a role in Gallahans' demise. The magazine quoted Shrawder as saying, "We believe that it is financially irresponsible to continue business as usual based on the hope that the economy will turn any time soon."
On Monday, which had been advertised as the store's final day, Gallahans' customers wandered two floors of the store in search of bargains. Oversized tags on Henredon sideboards, Stickley chairs and handmade Oriental rugs bore their original prices in black ink and markdowns in red. Some also wore "Sold" signs and were packaged in bubble wrap and awaiting delivery.
Shrawder has promised that Severegn will continue to support Gallahans until all orders are delivered and all customer service issues are closed, according to the prepared statement posted on Gallahans' Web site.
The site, gallahans.com, also urges customers to contact Kurt Brachwitz, its customer service team leader, at
Email: kbrachwitz@gallahans.com if they have outstanding orders or unresolved issues.
Gallahans got its start in 1971 when Fredericksburg businessman Franklin H. Gallahan opened what was originally called Gallahan Furniture & Appliance in a 30,000-square-foot showroom and warehouse off Lafayette Boulevard on Olde Greenwich Drive. It was followed a year later by Gallahan Warehouse Sales at 510 Lafayette Boulevard, which specialized in furniture and appliances not carried at the main store.
Business was doing so well by 1973 that Gallahan enlarged the Olde Greenwich store and opened a branch in Culpeper. He also purchased Coach House Furniture in Bowling Green, and renamed it Gallahan's Coach House Furniture and Appliances.
That year, the Virginia-Carolinas Home Furnishings Representatives Association in High Point, N.C., gave him its Virginia retailer award.
By 1982, Gallahan had expanded into Williamsburg and Boca Raton, Fla., and added even more space to his main store. When completed, it had the largest display of Henredon-Schoonbeck furniture on East Coast.
Gallahan also closed the warehouse and Culpeper store that year, and in 1988 bought out Classic Furniture Interiors at Four-Mile Fork, which had gone bankrupt.
Gallahan's Furniture, as his main store came to be known, made headlines in 1991 when it refurnished the President's Room at Montpelier in Orange County before a visit by George Bush, and again in 1993 when a White House staffer sought the store's help in decorating a conference room in the historic Old Executive Office Building off the West Wing of the White House.
But Gallahan's Furniture was deeply in debt by the following year, and Gallahan, 54, committed suicide at the store on June 8, 1994. According to an article in The Free Lance-Star, he'd met with creditors the day before and was said to be despondent about the prospect of losing the business.
Gallahan's went into a financial nosedive that landed it in bankruptcy court. Phil Kennett, who headed Stone-Lee, purchased the business the next year and moved the store into its modern, 85,000-square-foot showroom in the Lee's Hill Commercial Center off U.S. 1 in 2001.
The business ran into trouble five years later when Stone-Lee's sister company, Wood Armfield, filed for bankruptcy and subsequently closed. The businesses were run as separate entities, but manufacturers stopped shipping orders to Gallahan's customers until Severegn stepped in and took over.
"Gallahans had been a really successful store," Shrawder said at the time. "I thought, 'I know I can turn it around and it will be worth doing it.'"
Cathy Jett: 540/374-5407
Email: cjett@freelancestar.com
