The Cupertino Courier

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Merchants rising from the ashes

By Cody Kraatz

How do you recover when a major part of your life goes up in flames?

It's a question some small business owners on the border of Cupertino and West San Jose are grappling with after a three-alarm fire destroyed their retail building on Feb. 3.

De Anza Interior general manager Jennifer Ho, whose parents Stephen and Theresa Ho own the business, was devastated by the loss but determined not to be beaten.

"We knew that we had to get back on our feet and start right away. That's the only thing we can do," said Ho. "Everything we've built in the last 10 years is gone, but that's nothing compared to the 30 years of design my mother had on file there."

Theresa Ho had an enormous stock of hand-rendered designs from throughout her career stored at the showroom. None of them can be duplicated. At the time of the fire she was in Los Angeles for treatment of stress-induced heart problems, said Ho. Her father is there now also, and she asked them not to return as planned because it would be too stressful.

The family-owned and-operated business, which started as a flooring company and has since expanded to kitchens, bathrooms and window coverings, has been at its current location on S. De Anza Boulevard since 1998.

The business's insurance policy, which the family bought early on and never boosted as the business grew, may not be sufficient to cover what Ho estimates to be $200,000 to $300,000 worth of losses in building materials and computers. The policy will cover only about $100,000, she said.

All the materials for design projects in process are being reordered and rushed to the family's home, which has become a temporary base of operations. Their beautifully decorated but somewhat chaotic home just east of the showroom will act as an office and storage facility while Ho and her staff teacher. Their phone number is working again: 408.861.0166..

Luckily, some materials arrived late, and her sales representatives and suppliers have been very supportive, Ho said.

Tanya Tseng's neighboring Legends Salon was also destroyed in the blaze.

"I actually have 12 people working in the salon, and we have been very affected because we have no place to work at this point. All our tools have been damaged, so we have nothing to work with," said Tseng.

For the next few months, she has arranged to lease a nearby space at 1279 Kentwood Drive, on the other side of De Anza Boulevard near Nob Hill Foods. That complex will be demolished in July, she said, so they have been applying to lease other spaces.

Tseng has her business phone number working and will forward messages from clients to their stylist. The number is 408.255.9461.

Tseng and her co-workers were busy cleaning and painting the temporary store the week after the fire, and they hope to buy equipment for their stations on Craigslist and eBay. They will be open by Feb. 13, Tseng said.

"We will be losing clientele," said Tseng, who estimates that the stylists' appointment books damaged in the fire contained thousands of client names.

She could not estimate the dollar value of the damage, but said, "With something like this, you build your life around it, you know, and then it's gone. We just don't know how to recover at this point."

Minh Hoang has been a manicurist at Legends for six years.

"My table, everything that you need for nails, all my personal belongings were destroyed," she said. Hoang estimates the value of the tools and equipment, most of which she bought new when she started at Legends, at about $3,000. She is buying new tools and will bring a table and chair from home for now.

The fire appears to have started in Fatima Restaurant, according to the San Jose Fire Department, and was reported around 4 a.m.

Fatima Restaurant owner Richard Hsu started the businessmore than 11 years ago. He plans to wait one to two years for the building to be repaired and then open the restaurant again.

The insurance policy he and his wife had on the restaurant is not sufficient to cover the costs, he said.

There were no sprinklers in the building, which was built before fire codes required them, and there were no firewalls between the spaces, said SJFD investigator Rick Carruth. Firewalls are generally used to separate a hazardous business from other businesses, he said.

L.L. Chow, who has a phone number listed in San Francisco, identified herself as the property manager of the building but declined to say how long she had owned the building. Chow visited the building on the day of the fire, Hsu said.

"We understand their loss. We're sorry that it happened, and it's unfortunate,'' said Chow in a telephone interview. "To this date there is no sense of what caused it, and we are not laying any blame. We are working with the fire department in trying to shore up the building so that investigators can do their work.''