65 Degrees Magazine, Winter 2010
As a child, Mike Poppleton practiced calligraphy. It was part of his Japanese heritage and the founda- tion for his appreciation of design that would carry him through his college years and into his profes- sional life as a designer and retailer.
“In calligraphy, you have to consider the balance, the overall impact and aesthetics,” explains Poppleton, who sits among his expansive furniture store in Monterey. The collection that surrounds him echoes his appreciation of design—there are Italian imports, hand finished and ornately etched, as well as a collection of jaw-dropping antiques.
But Poppleton’s Furnishings & Interior Design wasn’t always Poppleton’s, the eponymous shop housed on Lighthouse Avenue. Before it was Poppleton’s, the largest retailer of furniture on the Monterey Peninsula, it was Butcher Block and Barstools, a small furniture store in Capitola.
Twenty-seven years ago, Poppleton acquired Butcher Block and Barstools through an ad in the Businesses For Sale section of the Wall Street Journal. “It was only one year old and a small store so I bought it,” tells Poppleton. “From there it just kept growing.” As the store transformed, its original name no longer fit with the upscale inventory. “It came down to Poppleton’s and Dovetails. I wanted Dovetails, but the staff said Poppleton’s is better, so I said ‘okay, let’s do it.’”
Poppleton trusts his employees. He humbly says that hiring excellent people is one thing he can take credit for. Poppleton has 13 people on payroll, which he says is “not bad for a Mom and Pop shop.” But it’s really just a Pop shop, as Poppleton oversees it all himself.
Poppleton wasn’t always a retailer. Before selling highly stylized goods, he made them. With a degree in Industrial Design from San Jose State University, Poppleton pursued car styling. He had a love of cars even as a child. “I always sketched cars as a little kid; really anything that was moving, I loved,” he says. His love of cars continued into his teen years when he dreamed of being a car stylist.
A summer internship program at GM made that dream a reality, and shortly after college GM hired him to work on their design team. Among his favorite tasks was converting a Cadillac Seville for the Geneva Auto Show. “We put in Rolls Royce leather and modified the interior, the exterior, and shipped it to Geneva,” exclaims Poppleton, whose voice fills with excitement as he talks about the project.

While he liked the job at GM, he hated the weather and looked for a reason to move back to California. He found it in a Wall Street Journal ad, and thus Mike Poppleton the designer was replaced with Mike Poppleton the retailer. But before there was Mike Poppleton the designer, there was Mike Poppleton the child in Washington State, and before that, Hawaii, and even before that he was a little boy named Manibou Arai (Manibou translated means to study and learn) living in Japan. Mike Poppleton acquired his current name through his stepfather, Sydney Robert Poppleton, who was in the Navy and met Mike’s mother during the war. The family took Poppleton as their surname and began a new life in the United States.
Despite being given the name by his stepfather, Mike Poppleton has made a name for himself. From his teen years as the National Judo Champion of his division (his success got him a scholarship to SJSU) to his adult years as proprietor of his namesake shop, Poppleton is fully Poppleton.
And his store seems to reflect all the parts of himself. There’s the gorgeous leather couches, reminiscent of his early GM days, Asian-inspired art hangs on the walls, and most notably, hand drawn tags adorn each piece of his furniture. Poppleton sketches each piece of furniture on a small card and hand writes a history of the product. He says he draws the tags to make it easier for him to keep track of sales, but like the calligraphy he learned as a child, the strokes perform double duty as both art and story. °