Word on the Street: Interior office designer gets new Fresno showroom

CORE Business Interiors has moved to a new location in Fresno with a showroom displaying its office furniture and modular walls.

The 4-year-old local business is a full-service interior design firm specializing in offices. It left its Clovis location and moved to its new space at 7910 N. Ingram Ave. near Fallbrook Avenue about two months ago.

The new glass-walled conference room and other interior walls are examples of the type of design work CORE Business Interiors provides.

The company sells Haworth products, including office furniture, cubicles, cabinets, walls and floors.

The walls are designed to be moved or modified as businesses evolve, CEO Tom Zimmerman said. They’re not designed to be moved on a monthly basis, but are intended for businesses that expect to be in their building long-term. Instead of remodeling repeatedly over the years, businesses have the flexibility to modify their workplace without taking a sledgehammer to the walls, he said.

“One of the big driving forces of that is the huge generational changes happening in the workforce,” he said.

Younger workers may be looking for more public work tables or lounges where they can work on an iPad, for example, he said.

CORE also sells raised flooring that allows businesses to run power to computers or water to dentist chairs under the floor. Fresno County used this flooring when it moved offices into the former Sunnyside Bowl bowling alley.

Details: corebusinessinteriors.com.

Thrift store trades up

A thrift store that raises money for animal rescue efforts is moving to much larger quarters with greater traffic visibility near Blackstone Avenue in Fresno.

For more than 2-1/2 years, the 4 Sisters Thrift Store has operated out of a 3,500-square-foot space in the aging Ashlan Park shopping center, at Ashlan and Cedar avenues — a space the store has outgrown, co-owner Kim Lashbrook said.

The store is scheduled to reopen today in its new site in the former Dunn-Edwards paint store at 1727 E. Gettysburg Ave., on the north side of Gettysburg just east of Blackstone. Lashbrook — one of two sets of sisters that run the store — said the new building has almost three times the space of their old site.

“We’re really lucky to get this space,” Lashbrook said last week as she and others were hauling merchandise from one building to the other. The former paint store, at about 9,500 square feet, had been empty for about a year. It offers warehouse space as well as room for racks and shelves, which will be less cramped than at the old location.

The interior walls of the new store are painted in an array of bright colors, each denoting a different type of merchandise — one color for the book section, another for shoes, another for vintage furniture, and so on. “We wanted to bring a little life to it,” Lashbrook said.

Lashbrook and her sister, Lori Hare, and another set of sisters, Melissa Wrightson and Susan Holley, opened the store in April 2010. They donate a portion of their profits to Animal Rescue of Fresno, a no-kill animal shelter. The store also accepts donations of used goods to be sold to raise money for the shelter.

Details: 4sistersthrift.com or on Facebook at quick link fblinks.com/sisters.

The Fresno Bee