New Elkhorn market opens today
By SUSAN BAILEY
The Wood River Journal~Sun Valley
Doug Logan spent several winters in Sun Valley, so he knew the Elkhorn marketplace was ripe for a grocery store. Today, he's finally open after several months of preparation.
If the numbers of customers who've been stopping to see if he's open are any indication, he's going to be busy in there. His market, called the Market at Elkhorn Springs, isn't a convenience store to pick up a bottle of aspirin or a quart of milk.
It's all grocery store and looks like one.
“When people walk in, I want them to see fancy natural foods,” Logan said. “I don't want it to look like a convenience store. We'll have cigarettes but they'll be behind the counter.”
Four thousand square feet are divided into dairy, produce, meat, deli and wine and cheese sections with 26 bulk item bins, a lunch counter, pizza sold by the slice, restrooms and a manned espresso station serving Seattle's Best Coffee. Several outdoor tables allow sandwiches to be eaten on site.
Logan designed the layout of the store and created the lettering for the section walls with an upscale population in mind. Natural foods and organic items are a specialty along with Magic Valley organic farm produce and milk brought by Idaho's Bounty.
Shelves are not as deep or as high as a chain supermarket and sunshine rather than florescent bulbs light the place.
Most unusual of all is the original artwork on the walls. Through an arrangement with Kelly Staples, owner of House of the Rising Sun in Ketchum, oil paintings of fruits and vegetables, wine in bottles, happy chefs at work and even American Indians on horseback decorate the walls.
The building, designed by Dave Barovetto to resemble a barn, was completed in April to serve the new Elkhorn Springs neighborhood along with existing neighborhoods such as surrounding Bonne Vie and Fairway Nine condominiums and Twin Creeks and Sagehill residential areas.
Rafters dominate the ceiling, giving it a spacious feeling without the coldness of a warehouse.
Logan started in the grocery business as a bag boy in Helena, Mont., at age 16 and has stayed in the industry for the past 25 years. Although groceries weren't a family business, his brother manages Safeway markets in California.
“My thought was, I'd get to work wherever I wanted to live,” said Logan, who has lived in Snowmass and Glacier National Park to prove his theory.
A former resident of Telluride, Colo., where he managed a grocery store for the past three years, Logan aims to bring Elkhorn residents in for regular shopping. He wants to be their store. For weeks, they've wanted to come in. Customers who have entered the building at 95 Badeyana Drive to check their Elkhorn post office mailboxes keep peering in the windows like kids in a candy shop.
At last, they will be able to come inside.
Logan said he plans to open at 7 a.m. and stay that way past 7 p.m. seven days a week for the summer. Trained as a meat cutter, Logan will cut fresh beef and lamb for the store. Albeit on a smaller scale, he plans to carry most of the food sold at Atkinsons' Market and Albertsons. Grace Organics coffee, Fungus Among Us dried mushrooms and Doctor Kracker crackers are some of the items already on the shelves.
Suggestions for other favorite items are currently being taken at 622-5400.
Logan said his passion is customer service, the friendly face, the willingness to help buyers and the desire to carry items customers want to buy.
“We're going to be customer-service oriented,” Logan said. “I'm very sensitive to that because I've been in the business since I was 16 years old and I know how I liked to be treated at that age. People who shop here are going to feel appreciated.” m
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