For twenty-eight Decembers, there was a man in that building who wasn’t a man at all — not to the kids in the line. He was Santa Claus. The same one, every year, with live reindeer on the lawn and a line that wrapped around a rustic north-woods lodge just south of Maple Grove Parkway.
For twenty years, there was a Girls Night Out inside those same walls that raised money for CROSS Services, one dollar and one glass of wine at a time. For forty years total, in one form or another, there was a couple — Dave and Linda Looney — who believed, as Dave put it, that a business is as much a citizen of a town as anyone else living in it.
Last winter, they announced they were retiring. Forty years is a long time to hold a standard. They wanted to make sure whoever took their building next would hold it too.
They didn’t sell to the highest bidder. They sold to the business they believed would keep it.
This spring, Bridal Aisle Boutique — Annette Hall’s thirteen-year-old shop from Osseo, with 2,000 gowns and a reputation for getting brides out the door same-day, dress in hand — became the new owner of the building everyone in Maple Grove still calls The Woods.
“We have a standard that we represent in Maple Grove,” Dave Looney said, “and we wanted it to be the same.”
When the Looneys announced their retirement, 450 responses landed almost immediately. And Dave’s own staff — people who were losing their jobs — reacted, every one of them, the same way. “The first thing they say is, ‘We are happy for you and congratulations.’”
That’s the thing Bridal Aisle was actually buying. The timber and stone came with it.
Annette and Brad Hall spent the spring finding out what that meant. They left the bones alone — the timber, the stone, the lodge-like warmth that made it a landmark in the first place — and changed what happens inside them. Where gift shelves once stood, brides now sit with their moms, their sisters, their whole entourage, on real couches in front of real mirrors, watching each other walk out in dress after dress until someone says yes. Private fitting rooms, and a wall displaying the full 2,000-gown selection, so a bride sees her whole world of options before she tries on a single one. The men’s wing became The Woods Men’s Suits — named on purpose after the building rather than the boutique — with rentals and suits made to keep.
Bridal Aisle was doing business in the space by the end of March — the same month wedding dress season traditionally begins, Hall says, as new designer collections release — and threw the doors open for a grand celebration in May.
“All of our dresses are off the rack, brand new, that you can bring home with you that day,” Annette says. She means it literally. One bride drove down from Duluth on the day of her wedding and left with a gown, altered to fit, in time for the ceremony.
That promise built her business in Osseo for thirteen years. Now it has room.
“When they come in our door, we just want them to feel no fear, feel very comfortable.”
For all twenty-eight years of that Santa Claus line, the man in the suit was Dean Vehrenkamp, who now sits on the Corcoran City Council. Every kid who ever whispered a wish list to him grew up without knowing it.
The building has always been good at keeping secrets. It still is. The secret is just a dress now, hanging in a fitting room, that one particular groom doesn’t get to see until she’s walking toward him.
On the cover of this issue, a bride stands in front of that same building. Same timber. Same stone gables. Same lawn where Dave Looney once found three loose cows grazing, back when everything behind the property was farmland and a water tower.
She has no idea a live reindeer once stood roughly where she’s standing. She doesn’t need to. The building already knows how to hold a moment like this one. It’s just holding a different kind now.
Bridal Aisle Boutique and The Woods Men’s Suits are now open at 15825 95th Ave N, Maple Grove. BridalAisleMN.com
Forty years is a long time to hold a standard. They didn't sell to the highest bidder. They sold to the business they believed would keep it.