Decorating designs

While Marysville is not going to be confused with Beverly Hills and its million-dollar homes, the city does have a posh new home decorating store downtown.

Posh Decor opened Friday with 6,800 square feet of floor space at 512 D St. The store took over what had been storage space.

Della DeLima took her Designs by Della interior design business out of her Yuba City home and brought in Nancy Duplantier to help with the retail end of it. The store will employ four people.

DeLima said she has seen a steady increase in business over the past two years to the point where it was getting too large to operate out of her home.

"I went from one new job a week until almost one a day," DeLima said. "It became too much for a home-based business."

DeLima's clients are coming from new homes in Yuba City and Yuba County. Her Marysville location is just up Highway 70 from home building that could some day increase Yuba County's population by 50 percent. Three residential development areas, the East Linda Specific Plan, the North Arboga Study Area and Plumas Lake Specific Plan Area, have 20,000 homes at buildout.

All the new construction will mean more customers who need home decorating plans as well as new furniture, window blinds and other products.

"I think there is a market to be captured with all the new homes coming in," DeLima said. "Yuba City's exploding, but it's exploding in from Marysville now."

DeLima figures people from all the new homes would rather drive to Marysville from the Yuba-Sutter area than go to Sacramento.

"We offer the same thing that the city offers, you just don't have to go to Sacramento to get it," DeLima said.

While DeLima jokes that it helps to be located next to a golf store to get more influential customers, she said most of her clients are in the middle-class income bracket. They're often two-income families who don't have time to shop around for all the home furnishings they need. So they parcel out some or all of the work to DeLima, who charges $50 an hour. She said she tries to keep the billable hours to two or three hours in the case of picking out a color scheme.

Appeal-Democrat reporter John Dickey can be reached at 749-4711. You may e-mail him at jdickey@appeal-democrat.com.