How goats on the roof lead to Chinatown, trips to China

It’s summer road-trip season, and on the Port Alberni Highway, just west of Parksville, visitors will descend on a side-of-the-road family business. Some 35 years ago, Larry Geekie quit his job managing an Overwaitea store in the Kootenays and returned to Coombs, his dot of a hometown near Parksville.

Here, he inherited a 12-acre plot of land in the middle of nowhere and opened a produce stand. Eventually, this morphed into a sod-roofed, log-house market inspired by the dwellings of his father-in-law’s childhood near Lillehammer.

As the story goes, one night after drinking “homemade hooch down at my place,” they decided to let some goats graze on the sod roof because “we were talking about if animals in Norway do this, and that’s what happens after you have a gallon of wine,” said Geekie. Unexpectedly, the goats were a hit, and ever since hordes have come to check out the Old Country Market’s “goats on the roof.”

And every season, the retail business — food, specialty gifts, a restaurant — has expanded across the original property.

But this year, there is a jarring and unlikely addition that says much about how Geekie, over the years, has tried to bring something unique to this Vancouver Island patch, starting first in Vancouver’s Chinatown, then going to Asia himself — and now sending the next generation there too.

So, behind a set of flat, grass-topped cabins, hemmed beyond by pastoral fields where the goats go to roam, there is now a three-storey, 10,000 square-foot concrete building reminiscent of colonial-style mansions in southern China. And like warehouse emporiums you might find there and in other Chinese cities, it is packed with container-loads of old, refurbished furniture: Ming-style wedding cabinets, Qing and other dynasty-inspired armoire: trunks, chests, screens and bookshelves.

“Part of this is that Coombs is one of the most unlikely places to find this product, and I think that is our strength,” said Geekie. “What we have become is more of a destination point. We get business from all over the island. People are coming here for a shopping experience as much as the product.”

When he started, Geekie found many of his grocery goods — mostly specialty European food items such as cheeses, meats, spreads and chocolates — via importers in Vancouver. He did the same thing for his gift section, literally walking down Pender Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown to buy bamboo baskets and the like from sellers there. “Back then, many people here had never ever been to Chinatown. It was quite an experience just to do that and for them, those products, the baskets, were insane.”

These contacts later led Geekie to the famed Canton or China Import and Export Fair held twice a year in Guangzhou, China. “Once a year, they were gone to this fair, so we decided to follow them,” he said.

That was some two decades ago and there has been no turning back. The whole family now goes — sons Chad and Evan, daughter Zoe — even though the process isn’t the no-brainer it used to be.

“Before it gave us an edge,” said Geekie. “Now it’s much tougher. There are more people selling the same stuff. There are a lot of lost souls roaming around in those aisles.”

Still, the family fans out to find thousands of individual items: colourful mini-musical instruments, drums, xylophones, bells, notebooks, tableware, wooden toys of all sorts, landscaping materials. A contact made a decade ago, outside the fair, on a whim, continues to supply the refurbished furniture. “He has shown us a lot of life in southern China,” said Geekie of his adventures there.

The family also hits India for clothing, scarves, costume jewelry and trinkets and this year, hopes to add Japan to its list for the first time. “It’s probably the next area we want to source. I think we can relate easier to a lot of their products here in Western Canada, the design and quality of their goods,” said Geekie.

These days, Geekie is starting to pass the torch. “I hope my kids will carry it on and do it. They do the buying now. I sort of go if they need me, but I am 63 years old. It’s hard for me to know ‘What does a 25-year-old want?’ That’s why it has to change.”

To this end, Zoe is handling the old Chinese furniture and gardening, landscaping section. Chad oversees the specialty gifts and toys. Evan runs Wasabi, a surfboard and clothing shop housed in one of the sod-roof cabins.

Next year, the plan is to squeeze the Chinese furniture upstairs and open a cafe on the lower level of the new concrete building. Said Geekie: “It probably doesn’t belong here, and that’s why people are coming to visit. We don’t have building codes here and I am just going to tell you that that really gives us a chance to be a little bit original. It’s very different.”