By Patrick Wagner
PORTLAND, Ore. — John Tester and Jeff Myers opened Brooklyn Holding Company, a state-licensed medical marijuana dispensary, at the beginning of this year because they both wanted something different and they had the good fortune to do something about it.
Tester, prior to being a massage practitioner, had spent several years as a professional painter. Myers had more than 20 years of experience working as a flooring contractor. A lifetime worth of experience has been poured into nearly every inch of the store.
“We built all the walls. We put in all of the trim work. We built all of the cabinets, every bit of it, with the exception of part of the furniture,” Myers said.
The details are painstakingly gorgeous, harkening back to the Roaring Twenties — the walls are covered in imported English wallpaper with golden hues bordering the flowered design; all the signs are painted in a style that largely disappeared with the Great Depression; the cabinets are hand-made with intricate carvings; the doors look like they came from a haunted mansion and all of the details were aged to match the period. Even the iron gate over the door was crafted to show the initials BHC in a classic style.
“The genesis of it came from my partner John, who has an affinity for antiques,” Myers said. “I’m a modernist guy. He wanted to make it old style … and out of that grew the (Roaring Twenties) concept that makes sense because we’re basically watching the slow, long death of prohibition, and we’ve already seen one of those. So we said, ‘Well, let’s just do a throwback to the Prohibition era.’“
But the duo didn’t stop there. Even the Brooklyn Holding Company employees dress in period-appropriate outfits.
“John was the one that said, ‘Hey, why don’t we just dress the part while we’re at it?’ I was like, wow, why wouldn’t we?” Myers laughed. “We want to make an experience.”
While Brooklyn Holding Company might fit with Portland’s eccentric theme, the Powell Boulevard dispensary is more a labor of love shared over the course of a 30-year friendship, Myers said.
“We just got lucky and knew a talented pool of people that could come in and help us get it really focused,“ Myers explained.