Boyer’s Furniture opens in new North Side La Crosse building

Boyer’s Furniture has a new home — a brand new building at 1600 George St. — as the two buildings it occupied before will be razed soon to make way for a roundabout that will be part of next year’s South Avenue reconstruction project.

The business — which with the move has shortened its name from Boyer’s Budget Furniture to Boyer’s Furniture — opened Friday in its new North Side location.

Boyer’s had been selling new furniture in its building at 2100 West Ave. S., and used furniture in its building next door at 2356 South Ave. The business began in 1908 and had been at the South Side location for about 45 years.

Going forward, the furniture business will sell only new furniture at the new location, which has slightly less space than it had before, Vice President Aaron Boyer said. Boyer’s Furniture also has a parking lot for customers, something it didn’t have at the South Side location.

The new building is laid out better and will be more efficient, Aaron said.

He and his mother, Susan, who owns the business that Aaron eventually will own, and other Boyer family members are thinking of ways to remember his father at the store.

Rick Boyer died in his sleep on March 1 at age 68. He was a longtime baseball player and coach, and the furniture store’s television commercials for many years featured Rick and Aaron joking with Rick and Susan’s grandchildren.



“My dad is what we’re best known for,” Aaron said. Whenever someone tells him that Aaron reminds them of Rick, he takes that as a high compliment.

“He was a pretty good guy that lots of people liked,” Aaron said of his father.

“We’re planning to do something special” to remember Rick at the new store, Aaron said. “We’ve had a few ideas, but I don’t know exactly what we’re going to do yet.”

Susan and Aaron Boyer bought the vacant lot once occupied by Johnny’s Aloha service station in May, just two months after Rick died.

Before his death, Rick and Aaron Boyer had been looking for about a year for an existing building to move the furniture business to.

“That would have been easiest,” Aaron said of moving into an existing building. “But we couldn’t find a location that we liked.”

After Rick’s death, his wife and son began looking for vacant property where they could build a new furniture store.

“We found this lot that we thought was kind of similar (to the store’s South Side location), because it was at a stoplight,” Aaron said. “We like that area on the North Side,” partly because it’s on a busy street. “We wanted to have a place that would be big enough, that had parking, and that wasn’t too far away.”

The new building was constructed by Wieser Brothers General Contractor Inc.

Boyer’s Furniture is known for selling affordable furniture, Aaron said.

“I don’t sell junk,” he said. “But I like to have less expensive furniture.

“I also like to try and have smaller-scale stuff,” Aaron said. “Like a smaller table, chairs, sofas and recliners, because lots of people in town don’t have brand new houses with giant doorways and giant living rooms. And that’s what they’re building a lot of the new furniture for, is big houses and big living rooms.”

Aaron, who is 45, has been working at his family’s furniture business since he was 16. He said he enjoys his work partly because “You do a little bit of everything here, where every day is different.”

The store has six employees, and friends and relatives help from time to time, Aaron said.

The history of Boyer’s Furniture dates back to 1908, when J.W. Boyer and George Furber started the Boyer-Furber Furniture Co. at 511-513 Main St. The Boyer family bought the other half of the business after George’s son, James, died.