Adriana Alyk always knew she wanted to open her business on Friday the 13th.
“It’s just always been a good thing for me,” she said.
This Friday, Odd Aly-Kat Emporium will do just that, debuting at 240 S. Main St. in Brighton. It will be a one-stop shop for the quirky combination of local art, antiques, oddities and custom framing.
“I’ve always been in love with oddities … skulls and antique medical equipment and just weird things,” said Alyk, 35.
The main chunk of the 5,800-square-foot building will be an antique mall, reserved for local vendors that can rent anything from a single shelf for $30 a month up to an entire booth for $550. The business will take 15% of the profit, much lower than the competition, Alyk said. She plans to also offer consignment services, too, to help sell one-off items and collections.
There will also be a custom framing shop in the building too, run by Alyk’s friend Kelley Belisle-Vickery. Alyk’s father will run a small photo studio in the rear of the store, and her mom will sell some antiques from her collection.
“This used to be a laboratory for water and mineral testing, but it hadn’t been that in probably decades. It’s just been sitting vacant,” Alyk said of the space, which records show was built in 1917.
Alyk purchased the property with her mother in March 2024 for $390,000, all in cash.
That was the easy part. The building needed structural work and asbestos remediation. A $200,000 loan that Alyk’s mom had secured for construction didn’t go nearly as far as she thought it would.
“It looked bleak there for a bit,” she said.
By the summer, Alyk was facing a tough decision.
“Maybe, like, 20 years ago, it would have been enough, but now, no, the cost of construction has skyrocketed,” she said. “We were at a point where it was like, well, do we resell it with what we’ve done and hope that we make our money back? Or what can we do to continue on with the progress of this building?”
But the antique proprietor persevered, securing a $1 million loan from the Colorado Enterprise Fund to cover the remaining construction costs with “a little extra for all of the things that you don’t think of,” she said.
Local firm M&C Construction built out the space for Alyk. She received numerous bids north of $1 million, and chose M&C when they proposed to do the project for $700,000, she said.
“We’re kind of a medium-sized company that has the overhead structure of a guy in a pickup,” M&C President Nathan Mendel said.
“I’m talking to you in my office, which is also my living room, right now.”
Mendel’s firm started work in the spring. Several hints of the building’s past are still there, including exposed beams and trusses in the roof. When the Emporium opens on Friday, it’ll be the culmination of a two-year-long journey for Alyk. Her first taste of the business was selling pieces of her mother’s antique collection at various flea markets in 2023.
“We literally have a full barn full of everything you could imagine,” she said.
A Colorado native, Alyk had spent her professional career working as a dog boarder. But when the Odd Aly-Kat Emporium opens Friday, she’ll leave the canines behind for a feline future.
“My last name is Alyk. So Aly-k is the Alyk. But my husband has always been a bowler, so with his name, he was always the alley cats, so just kind of taking that and running with it.”
