City Living Furniture

General information

In the summer of ’71, a young man went to Providence, Rhode Island during his vacation. He worked in a little shop there for a few weeks, made $1,500, and returned home to open his first store. Waterbed City opened on the corner of Commercial Boulevard and Dixie Highway in Fort Lauderdale. It grew to be the biggest seller of waterbeds in South Florida.

The young man was Kevin Koenig. He was soon joined by his younger brother Keith and Keith’s friends Mike Lennon, Garry Ikola, and Steve Wilder. Fueled by their entrepreneurial spirit and inherent good business sense, they opened up more Waterbed City stores.

They were the first to start partnering with manufacturers in North Carolina, bringing in dressers, nightstands, and mirrors to go with their beds. They were adventurers and inventors, and anything was possible. They worked together, played together, and they were wild.

Then in 1989, after 17 years of steady growth, the waterbed industry reached a plateau. The intrepid team committed waterbed heresy – they introduced conventional innerspring mattresses to their line-up!
Six years later they decided they needed to reinvent their business.

City Furniture opened in August 1994. This was the first of many full-line furniture stores. Within its first month trading, profits were twice what Kevin, Keith, Mike, Garry, and Steve had estimated. They quickly set about converting all of their Waterbed City stores into City Furniture stores and nearly went out of business!
It was a difficult transition, but by May of 1995 with a new advertising campaign running, City Furniture was well on its way to success.

The philosophy behind City Furniture has always been to provide customers with great value, both in terms of quality and cost. This, together with the company’s strong entrepreneurial edge and family spirit, has led City Furniture along a path of incredible achievements.