Cobb: Customer service, one drape at a time

At 732 Cherokee St. near WellStar Kennestone Hospital sits an empty building with a lot of memories for some. Oh, I guess the whole building isn’t much of a keepsake for recollections, but a small corner of it is. It’s where Dean’s Linens used to be, a retail store that featured reasonable prices for linens to outfit your home.

Dean Greenway, along with husband Jack, has been retired about four years now, and she recently told me they’re enjoying it immensely. But they miss their customers. And, I suspect, their customers miss them, because of the quality and care they practiced.

Dean’s Linens got started in the early ’90s when Dean’s brother from Bremen encouraged her to open a store. He had been in the linen business too. She said her brother sold her on the idea when he heard a property had become available near the hospital, with “all those women working there” who might need to shop for linens at lunch or after work.

They persuaded the owner of the building, the late Dr. Remer Clark, a Marietta physician, to rent them a space on the north end in what was essentially a medical building. The Greenways’ brand of medicine, though, was the home remedy kind for those of us challenged with interior design.

We discovered Dean’s Linens in 1997 after buying a three-bedroom home in Cherokee County. You wouldn’t have known it then, but Dean and Jack had only been in the business about three years when my wife and I first went in.

The Greenways seemed such experts about matching styles and patterns for window treatments, drapes and bedding. They were disarmingly folksy, with an eye for upscale design.

If you wanted a deep dust ruffle for a bed that was higher than the norm, Dean would order it for you. She told me she would even custom order materials for those ultra king-sized beds for people from all over. “It didn’t matter who they were,” said Dean, “we ordered and sold materials for your average home and even for doctors’ wives and lawyers’ wives.”

Our average home in Cherokee was decorated with many items bought there. When we sold it and moved to Cobb, the new owner wanted to keep the window treatments.

Among other talents, Jack specialized in educating customers about how to mount those window treatments with a hands-on walkthrough right in the store using a sketch he’d let you take home. Though this line of work was a far cry from the stone business he retired from after 25 years, Jack was a full partner in the operation.

Dean could help with anything sold there or out of a catalog, and she had a remarkable memory for where everything was located.

But her memories don’t just stop with where everything was placed in the store. Most of all, she remembers how nice their customers were.

Dean told me they could have made more money going into homes, customizing and installing their products. But that wouldn’t have exposed them to as many shoppers.