From Scandinavia with love: Scan Home celebrates its 25th year in business.

• Author: Lavrakas, Dimitra
• Position: Scanhome

Scan Home, Anchorage's center for classic Scandinavian design, turns 25 this year and owner, Carl Propes, brought this innovative, modern form of furniture, lighting and home accessories to the state in a rather unusual way in 1983.

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Propes admits that when he began, he knew nothing about the furniture business. He isn't even of Scandinavian descent, but instinctively, he loved the design.

"I didn't know an end table from a coffee table," he said.

"When I bought my first house, I had no furniture and this guy from Portland brought up a container of Scandinavian furniture and I bought an unassembled bench for my empty house and put it together. I thought it was ingenious how it was put together. I thought it was neat and that we should have something like this up here."

Through a friend. Propes found an early partner who agreed to come up from Seattle. He looked around and decided that the city was ripe for the product.

"The Scandinavian Furniture Fair was in two weeks, so we ran out and got passports and jumped onto a plane." he said. "We got to the house where we were supposed to stay and it had burned to the ground. All of the hotels were booked, but we finally found some place to stay."

On the basis of his partner's reputation alone, Danish manufacturers agreed to ship five containers of furniture to Anchorage.

"We had no store," Propes said. "The containers came in August. The sale was on a Thursday and the containers didn't arrive until the day before.

"We rented the old roller rink (now Arctic Office Supply) and hired guys from around town--it had to be assembled by the time of the sale--and it took all night. Somehow we were able to sell most of the furniture."

On the basis of that 10-day sale, Propes got a Small Business Administration loan and opened the store a year later. By then, his partner had headed back to Seattle and another job. not interested in spending a winter in Alaska.

But from that modest beginning, Scandinavian design was well received. The clean planes and organic lines that define the style appealed to Alaskans, so did the price and the portability of an unassembled product that is easily shipped anywhere in the state.

The furniture business also had the added appeal of yearly trips to Scandinavia, and a personal plus of meeting and becoming friends with suppliers. Since those early years, change has come to the Scandinavian furniture industry.

"Sadly, the Scandinavian furniture business has...