Peabody’s christens design practice

Furniture store does custom work

Buoyed by a rising tide of business and increasing demand, the owners of Peabody’s Interiors have formally launched a design practice, Schlagenhaft Studio.

“I’ve been talking about this idea for a couple of years, but I felt like we had to wait until the timing was right,” Kelly Boecker, president of Peabody’s, said Tuesday.

The new unit of Peabody’s, a high-end home furnishings store at 8655 N. Deerwood Drive in Brown Deer, is named for Boecker’s uncle, the late Jon Schlagenhaft.

A Milwaukee-area interior designer, Schlagenhaft died in a 2008 small-plane crash that also killed his partner, Curtiss Stern, and the pilot.

Schlagenhaft and Stern had bought Peabody’s, then located in Whitefish Bay, just weeks earlier.

Ownership of the store passed to Schlagenhaft’s sisters, Susan Gallion and Jeanne Kraker. Boecker — Gallion’s daughter — took over management.

They moved Peabody’s to the village area of Brown Deer in 2010, and into a building originally intended to house Schlagenhaft’s design business.

That business had shut down with Schlagenhaft’s death, but as the economy improved and Peabody’s customers increasingly

asked for custom design work, the furniture store added to its staff of designers.

Among them: Teresa Manns, a Parsons School of Design graduate whose résumé includes 12 years working for noted New York interior designer Steven Gambrel.

Manns and Peabody’s other designers have been putting their stamp on the business for a few years, and Boecker said the time was ripe to brand the design practice, using her uncle’s name.

“We’re ready,” Boecker said. “We’ve grown to a point where we’re proud and confident about using his name. … It really is giving an identity to what our business has evolved into. We still are going to keep Peabody’s as our retail division. But the Schlagenhaft Studio is our custom work for our larger projects.”

Peabody’s employs 17 people, and the design staff has been working on “some really huge projects,” Boecker said.

With the economy again on firm footing, she said, people have been building the types of expensive homes that call for design talent.

“Four or five years ago there weren’t as many people looking for interior designers,” Boecker said.

She said Peabody’s workload includes a planned residential high rise here and a project for a TV celebrity in Nashville, Tenn.

“We just did a $10 million house in Mequon that we finished up this year,” Boecker said. “So people are starting to spend again, and I think having these projects in our portfolio is a big deal for us.”