Finding their niche in furniture - The Jewish Chronicle

He came from a long line of furniture retailers in the Birmingham area, while she studied furniture design in St Petersburg. But when Marcus Johnson met Lena Gurevich in Israel, the couple had no idea they shared a common interest in beautiful tables, chairs, sofas and other staples of a well-dressed home.

“That we should have furniture in common was a complete coincidence,” says Lena, who by that time was putting her interior design skills to use for one of Tel Aviv’s top home furnishing emporia. But it was their personal, rather than professional paths which crossed in Israel, with what Marcus describes as: “an accidental meeting... one of those very special romantic moments that change your life in a flash”.

“I had made aliyah with my first wife and four children, but came back to the UK in 2001 after we divorced,” says Marcus.
He had once owned a furniture store in Petach Tikva but was merely visiting Israel when he met the woman who was to become his second wife (in 2011) and his business partner.

Now he and Lena own the online furniture-retailing business Against the Grain. Marcus credits the creative skills Lena has brought to design of the highly successful website which has replaced the bricks-and-mortar store of the same name in Chester (this closed late last year).

“Since going online in December 2018, we’ve been in the top two per cent of websites for hits and we have also retained the customers we’ve won,” he says. While the couple sell pieces by household names from Marks & Spencer to John Lewis and Harveys, they are particularly proud of Habufa, the Dutch design firm Marcus introduced to Britain 20 years ago: “Of their 17 ranges, three are bespoke, allowing dozens of different customised combinations,” he says.

The link with the Netherlands is apposite, for Marcus’s maternal family dates back to 1640, when as Dutch Jews they were among the first to arrive back in Britain after the Expulsion. His father’s family were more recent arrivals: “They came from Russia between the World Wars and were Josephsons until my father and his brother decided to change their name, after a lot of bother with blackshirts and Fascists in the East End,” he says.

Marcus’s father moved to Birmingham and started Alan’s Furniture with his three sons, expanding to seven branches across the Midlands. The firm disbanded after his death, prompting Marcus’s move to Israel.

Lena’s own move to Israel in the 1990s was born of desperation: “Things were very hard during perestroika, with the economy collapsing, and as a single mother of a nine-year-old girl, I was at times near starvation point,” she says.

“Even when we moved to Israel, things were very, very hard for a long time. I longed to work in my profession, having a master’s degree in interior and furniture design, but I had so little Hebrew and there was a language barrier.”

Eventually she overcame that — the couple number Ivrit among the three languages each of them speaks — and got to use her design skills in Tel Aviv for seven years, until that chance meeting which changed her life: “We came back to England together in 2009 and started Against the Grain the following year.”

In 2011, after marrying, the couple moved to Chester and found a large store, successfully experimenting over the years with internet trading, which eventually persuaded them it was time to move exclusively online.

Now Lena no longer designs furniture but employs her creative skills to engage customers to check out beautiful pieces designed by others: “We sell only what we love and my mission is to draw the customer in by making an emotional impact with strong images,” she says. Marcus adds that spending a year designing the site to ensure smooth navigation has helped — “you can go straight to a product in only two clicks”. He also makes sure to use language that is “personal, humorous and captivating”, though he credits the images with “drawing customers deeper into the site and giving them a reason to stay longer”.

Although interior design is not an official part of the offering, Lena does add value by helping customers who send in drawings. “I’m always happy to make suggestions about how they can best place their new furniture in a room layout,” she says. When not at work, the couple like to get back to Israel as often as possible, to see their children and grandchildren, still living in the place where they experienced the thunderbolt that brought them together.