Saager Dilawri and Karyna Schultz, Neighbour

Vancouver, British Columbia
Interview by Sheila Lam
Photographs by Donnel Garcia

Something that I’ve always admired about Neighbour, is how time seems to operate inside the store: never hurried, never rushed. Step in from West Cordova Street in Vancouver, BC, and the city recedes, taking its noise and particular brand of chaos with it. Wooden accents warm against white walls and tiled floor. Felt curtains and jute flooring add an unexpected dimension. Pio Manzù and Achille Castiglioni's lights dot around corners. You find, almost without noticing, that you have slowed down.

It would be easy to assume that the pair behind a store like this live accordingly, with the same controlled deliberateness, the same editorial eye trained on every corner of their lives. That the details extend seamlessly, from the shop floor to the dinner table. That everything is considered, curated, quietly perfect. And in a way it is, but more interestingly, it isn’t, quite.

Saager Dilawri and his wife Karyna Schultz run Neighbour together, he overseeing the men’s side and she the women’s, and have been doing so for over a decade. Their lives outside the store are, by their own account, beautifully ordinary. Saager plays hockey in a local league when he can find the time. Most evenings, after their daughters are in bed, there’s maybe an hour or two to decompress before the whole thing starts again. Karyna, who came to the business through a former life of casting, internships, and styling assisting in New York (work she describes as happening “with one hand,” often literally, now that there are children in the picture) finds that the skills most useful to her with the store are the ones she learned at home. “When I’m dealing with a client complaint, I think: okay, all they need is to be heard. You can still hold the line on your answer, but you just have to do it like this.”

There is something both funny and genuinely instructive in that observation. The store, for all its considered atmosphere, runs on the same currency as a household with young children: patience, attention, and the ability to stay calm while managing a great many things at once.

The two of them spent formative years in New York, orbiting the same industry, the same neighbourhoods, one block apart as it turned out, knowing all the same people without ever actually meeting. Saager left New York after studying fashion merchandising at Parsons School of Design to open Neighbour at 26. Karyna arrived at the business later, through a set of circumstances she describes as just kind of happening: a friend closing down a line, a space becoming available, experience from both their time in New York clicking into place.

That quality, of things converging naturally without being forced, runs through how they talk about almost everything. Their buying trips to Paris have, over the years, produced a small recurring phenomenon: Saager and Karyna, attending separate appointments, would find themselves drawn independently to the same colours, the same silhouettes, the same quietly considered pieces. “Always parallel,” he says. “Like we were on the same page without having to say anything.” It sounds romantic, and it is, but it also reflects something more practical: a shared sensibility so thoroughly internalised that it no longer requires discussion.

At home, in Vancouver, the rhythm is simple: family, friends, hockey. Travel two or three times a year for work, Paris for buying, elsewhere for the kind of inspiration that only distance provides, and then back to the city, which neither of them has ever seriously considered leaving. Saager’s parents are here, Karyna’s sister, and so on. The roots are deep, and they hold. “We sometimes feel envious when people are able to go away,” he says, “but it’s very fleeting. We know we have such a good thing here.”

We all laugh sincerely that one of the good things here, in part, is the air. If you ever fly into YVR International Airport, step out of the terminal and take a deep breath. The air is almost piercing in the chest, so crisp it feels, in another word, delicious. It is an unexpectedly sensory way to experience the city, and it says something about how to move through the world: with the same attentiveness that is brought to a garment, a space, a fabric at the store, noticing the texture of things.

This is, perhaps, where the store and their life genuinely meet. Not in any grand aesthetic alignment, but in an orientation toward the everyday that finds pleasure in particulars. The material that improves with wear. The space that makes you forget, briefly, where you are. The hour after the kids go to bed. The air off the mountains, cold and clean.

Neighbour, at its best, is a store that asks you to slow down and pay attention—to notice what something is actually made of, how it is likely to age, and whether it is worth your time. Saager and Karyna seem to apply the same question, more or less, to everything else. It is not an austere way to live. It is, if anything, the opposite: a life that has decided, quietly and without fuss, what it actually values.