BoConcept opens on Fillmore

Home furnishing stores — which took a big hit during the last decade — are seeing a resurgence on Fillmore, especially in the block between Pine and Bush, home to Zinc Details, Design Within Reach, the Shade Store and newcomer Ruby Living Design. 

Today the block got something new in modern home design when BoConcept opened behind a dramatic black facade at 1928 Fillmore.

“We always had our eye on Fillmore,” says Caroline Krogh-Jensen, who owns the store with her husband, Soren Krogh-Jensen.

The couple couldn’t find a local space when they brought the contemporary Danish line of urban furnishings to the West Coast two years ago. So they opened a showroom at Townsend and Second — just as the banking crisis unfolded and the economy went into free-fall. “It was a difficult time,” says Caroline Krogh-Jensen, “but so rewarding that we made it happen. Slowly but surely it got better.”

Even as the economy began gradually to improve, though, they found that the buyers they were seeking from north of California Street still weren’t making the trek south of Market.

“We came up with an innovative idea,” says Krogh-Jensen. “We call it a BoConcept inspiration boutique.” It’s a neighborhood-sized setting with only a portion of the designs on display. “You get inspiration from a more limited selection,” she says. But everything is nearby on a big touch screen — where their design consultants can enter measurements and drag and drop the full BoConcept line — and also at the showroom on Townsend.

The Fillmore store will offer a complimentary in-home consultation to determine a client’s preferences and take measurements, then create a design presentation using BoConcept’s own software. The smaller neighborhood store is a new approach for the company. “We are the first one in the world,” says Krogh-Jensen. “I envision this store as one of the most innovative furniture stories in the city, if not the country.”

She describes BoConcept’s offerings as “a very clean line of Danish contemporary design” that fits both Victorian homes and urban lofts.

Soren Krogh-Jensen worked with BoConcept in his native Denmark. The company is well known there and throughout Europe, where it has hundreds of stores. He helped open the first BoConcept store in the U.S. 13 years ago in New Jersey. That’s where he met Caroline, who was then practicing law. Eventually the company urged them to open their own store, and they brought the line to the West Coast. In addition to their Soma store, there are showrooms in Santa Monica and San Diego.

“Our love was always with San Francisco,” she says. “Every time we came here we fell in love more and more. And we thought the concept would fit best here.”

And she is confident they will fit well on Fillmore, too. “It creates a corridor of furniture shops,” Krogh-Jensen says. “We feel we perform better in that environment. These are all great people to be around. Yet we’re very different than all of them.”