Living Interiors brings life to office and home settings
Dianne Ruesch was bored. Her husband was working out of town. Her kids were growing older. She wanted something to do. She felt she needed something more.
“In 1990, I answered an ad,” Reusch said. The job filled her time as intended, but it wasn’t quite what she had in mind. “I was working minimum wage watering plants,” she said, “and I thought, ‘this isn’t for me.'”
“I tried to quit,” Ruecsh recalled, but the owner had other plans and said she was in need of someone to do office work. “I liked doing that better because I had done some bookkeeping in college. And I learned the business from the ground up.”
Ruesch stayed with the business and absorbed all she could to such an extent that she bought the business in 2002 when the original owner retired after 19 years.
For the next few years, Living Interiors remained mostly a commercial business based out of the Ruesch family home. After deciding she needed a place to house her business, Dianne said she remembered the mall. Having been bought by Summer Grove Baptist Church, some of the building had been remodeled and used for various church groups and activities, but a large portion of it remained unoccupied.
It seemed a good possibility for somewhere to have employees meet together, provide a work area and a location to keep materials.
“I remembered that big empty, building and approached them about renting space.”
“They were very glad,” Ruesch said of her request, and it has been a great place for the Living Interiors location.
When Living Interiors finally moved in and set up the work area, Ruesch realized the store had many windows. “I didn’t want to leave all this bare,” she said, of the glass storefront. Since Living Interiors was already a business that brought life to office settings, she felt she could extend that philosophy to the home.
“Anything that could be in a home, anything that brings life to an area” is what Ruesch thought would be a good addition, and the Living Interiors Gift Shop was born.
With the motto, “Bringing your home to life,” The retail store has something for everyone, said daughter Shannon Moffett. They concentrate on items likely to spread the feeling of family life and the comforts of home. There are, of course, plants, but Ruesch keeps silk and live options for customers. Among a fairly wide selection of rabbit figurines and roosters, there are also baby gifts, wedding gifts and even gourmet food items and aprons. “It’s all those things that make a house looked lived in,” said Moffett.
“We get new items in all the time,” said Ruesch. The many items for outdoors, including ornamental bird baths and feeders, are always changing, but there are two brands that remain constant in the gift shop’s wares. Living Interiors carries the Greenleaf line of products, which includes candles, scent diffusers and spa items such as lotions and linen sprays. Marissa, one of two clerks at the gift shop, straightened the store’s display of Greenleaf candles while picking them up and taking a whiff. “I have a new favorite scent each week,” she said.
Another stand-out brand is Wilton Armetale, a family-based business in Pennsylvania known for individually hand-casting and finishing its serviceware for one of a kind pieces.
“We have had many people excited to find out about those two brands being in the store,” said Ruesch, who found the Greenleaf products at the Market in Dallas and carries the dishes simply because she likes them herself.
In the commercial setting, Living Interiors maintains and guarantees the plants in their care at about a ten-day cycle. “We train them,” said Moffett, a Living Interiors’ plant technicians. “We don’t even want them to have experience, or they don’t do it my way,” Ruesch explained. “Taking care of a plant at home is different than this.”
And though Ruesch said her home actually has too few windows to be a good plant home, “The people who work for me love plants and have plants everywhere. That’s what it takes, you have to love it.”
Ruesch employs ten people with both sides of her business, and enjoys it.
A graduate of Southwood, said she is close to her two daughters and son who live nearby, and owning her own business gives her the freedom of “having no committed hours” and the time to spend with family.
“This is the kind of stuff that makes it a home,” Moffett said.
from ShreveportTimes.com © 2008
