Brown Building Materials closing after 60 years as owner looks to retirement

For more than six decades, Brown Building Materials has supplied Spokane residents and contractors with unique, hard-to-find home goods. That’s soon coming to an end, however, as the business is closing by the end of October.

Brown Building Materials owner Ron Brown is retiring and announced the company’s closure last week via Facebook.

“We very much appreciated the support throughout the years,” he said. “We’ll be selling things off the next couple of months. Hopefully, we will have an auction in October to kind of finish it off.”

Brown Building Materials was founded by Brown’s father, Richard, in 1959.

“My father was a general contractor and went into demolition,” Brown said. “After that, he couldn’t bring himself to throw things away, so he started collecting them and that led to selling recycled materials.”

Richard Brown moved the business twice before finding an 8-acre site on North Erie Street near the Hamilton Street viaduct.

“It was disorganized, but it had everything,” Brown said. “You would see a family Saturday morning at 10 and you wouldn’t see them again until 1 (in the afternoon). They would just wander around the whole time. And they had a great time.”

A fire destroyed the building in 2000, causing $750,000 to $800,000 in damage. Retail sales plummeted 47% following the fire, according to a 2001 Spokesman-Review article.

That’s when Ron Brown took over ownership from his father and rebuilt the business at its current 13,000-square-foot facility on Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

Brown said the business evolved over the years by adding new home goods to its existing inventory of used building materials, which include ornate wood windows with decorative glass and old door hinges from the Historic Davenport Hotel.

“It used to be more used materials and once we rebuilt, we needed product to sell, because it takes years to collect the old stuff,” he said. “So, at that point, we had to get into more new things, too.”

Brown Building Materials collects its inventory from auctions, contractors and residents. The company then trades or sells items at a discounted price.

“I think probably our biggest customers are the homeowners, the do-it-yourselfer,” Brown said. “It’s amazing how many people have heard about us and come in just to look.”

Brown said when the city began renovating schools in the 1980s, Brown Building Materials acquired a tremendous amount of brick.

“We had the contractors take the brick out to a field and we’d have employees clean the brick and re-stack them,” Brown said. “We found out we could sell them to California, Oregon and Nevada, and we did OK with that. We shipped a lot of brick.”

Brown was embroiled with the city of Spokane for several years about original design of Martin Luther King Jr. Way on the east end of downtown, which had the road cutting through Brown Building Materials’ parking lot.

The city discussed condemnation of Brown’s property in 2016, and officials offered a fair market value of $35,000 for the land, but Brown refused, stating he would go out of business because large trucks couldn’t navigate a smaller parking area.

“The problem was they were going to take a good chunk of our parking lot. With our business, we need to be able to get big trucks in and out of here,” Brown said. “For over 40 years, we were able to drive semitrucks in and back them out, and the city, with the new road, said, ‘you can’t do that anymore.’ ”

Brown hired attorney Bob Dunn to represent him and avoided a trial after the Spokane City Council approved an agreement last year to slightly move the road to the northwest, avoiding a portion of Brown’s parking lot. In exchange, Brown received some unused sections of Erie Street.

“It took so long. It kind of wears you out to fight about something like that,” Brown said. “It kind of gave me perspective that there’s other things I’d like to do.”

Brown said he’ll miss his long-standing employees and customers but is looking forward to spending time practicing photography and traveling with his wife.

“Our business has been kind of a longtime thing, and it’s really been nice dealing with individuals and getting to know them – not only the employees, but the customers too,” he said.