Saturday, March 22, 2008

Dallas Urban Asia offers accents for the home

By Minnie Payne

DALLAS — For those looking for that special hand-crafted piece of Asian furniture, Chinese Art or home décor item, it would behoove you to check out newly opened Urban Asia, 1901 N. Henderson Avenue, Dallas. And if that special piece isn’t there, 37-year-old wife/partner Denise Unkel and her 39-year-old husband/partner Christopher Crawford will help you find it.

“We opened Oct. 15, 2007 with a highly successful grand opening party, and are doing a pretty good business considering that we’ve only been here about six months,” said Unkel.

Unkel was born and grew up in Hong Kong until she moved to the United States at age 15, graduating from high school in 1989. Crawford was born and grew up in Dallas.

I worked as a designer for 15 years.” Unkel said. “When Chris and I married, we moved to China where we both worked for my importer/exporter father.”

She said that her husband wanted to return to Dallas to be near his family, so they decided to make the move and open Urban Asia.

“I remained in Shanghai for about a year, working at another business I have there, until Chris and developer Andres Properties found the building we’re presently housed in. That’s when we immediately began shipping merchandise to the United States,” she said. “I continue to rotate my time between China and the United States.”

A lot of Urban Asia’s artifacts were collected, she said, before they started shipping items to the United States.

“I shop antique dealers in China, as well as find a lot of furniture through people,” Unkel said. “Certain families want to get rid of their furniture, and we trade out.

“A lot of the furniture comes from people we know, so we know a lot of history.”

From the time Urban Asia opened, a lot of one-of-a-kind pieces have been flying out of the store, she said, and will be difficult to replace.

“There are very few true craftsmen left in Asia,” she said. “Right now we have a very small workshop that helps us preserve the furniture.

“What I would like to do is preserve peasant art – none of these things [artifacts] come from rich people’s homes.”

1901 N. Henderson Avenue, Dallas

After Urban Asia becomes somewhat established, Unkel said that it is their wish that they can buy hand-crafted art from all over Asia and enter into agreements with the village crafts people, whereby a part of the proceeds from their goods is returned to them, promoting and sustaining their crafts.

“We just love that we’re able to bring to the United States things from China and Asia that are too big for vacationers to bring back home themselves,” Crawford said. “We have some authentic treasures in our store.”

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