Sometimes big changes happen with a bang. An earthquake shakes. A volcano erupts. A pandemic hits.
Other times, the transition is a quiet, gradual changing of the guard. That’s what happened nearly a year and a half ago, in January 2025, when Sue Mautz, longtime owner and founder of The Arrangement, turned over the reins to daughter-in-law Deena Spang.
No press releases were issued. No big deal was made. Which made sense, because this big change occurred gradually over many years. Deena, who’s married to Sue’s son, Aaron Mautz, has been a mainstay at the iconic Beaumont Village gift store for a quarter century. “She’d really taken over about 10 years ago, doing the buying and the scheduling of employees’ shifts,” Sue said in a late March interview. “And after the pandemic I never really came back.”
No startling changes happened after the nearly invisible ownership change. “It’s a neighborhood beacon,” Deena said. “I feel no drastic changes are needed.”
The 46-year-old store is famed for its wide variety of men’s and women’s gifts, cards, holiday items, children’s books and toys, women’s clothing and jewelry, personal care merchandise, kitchen specialty items, and bar accoutrements. The original store was at 4223 NE Fremont (now Americana Frame). Three years later it moved across the street to its current longtime location, a revamped former gas station on the corner of Fremont and NE 42nd.
Beaumont-Wilshire “is everything anyone would want in a neighborhood,” Deena says. People in Portland “see the importance of their neighborhoods and support local businesses, which we are super grateful for.”
Chris Rauber and his wife moved to Portland and B-W in mid-2022 after many years in the San Francisco Bay Area. He wrote for the San Francisco Business Times and other publications. He was born in Oregon.