By Christina Surrano Photographs by Mike Baxter, Baxter Imaging Flashback 12 years ago to a barn in Cave Creek, the regular meeting site for Young Life, a Christian youth ministry organization. Young Ryan Durkin, whose parents owned the Cave Creek property and barn, grew up with these meetings in his back yard, and now, 12 years later, was a part of them. This is where he first met Kylie Fugate. They went to the same church, shared the same passion for design and travel and eventually cultivated a close friendship for over two years before finally crossing over to courtship. Kylie was reluctant at first. “The whole time we were friends, I felt like he was the best guy I’d ever met in my life, but I was young,” Kylie said. She didn’t want to risk losing her best friend if the relationship didn’t last. On the other hand, she didn’t want to get married too early if it did. Perhaps it was Kylie’s six-month-long mission in Switzerland and Uganda, combined with her parent’s epic tales of backpacking all over Europe, that made Ryan realize that he could lose Kylie to wanderlust. Ryan suggested they backpack Europe together for five weeks at the end of her mission. He met her in Switzerland and off they went, as friends. Soon after their return, they started dating. Two years later they married and continued to pursue their passions for travel and design together. Today, they are raising a family in Arcadia and own Retro Fashions, a custom screen-printing and embroidery business, and Modern Manor, a mostly vintage, midcentury modern furniture store in central Phoenix. Ryan started Retro Fashions in 2000. He had come across a dead stock (never been worn) Star Wars T-shirt with an image of Han Solo, circa 1980. Being a self-proclaimed Star Wars nerd, this was beyond exciting. He had left his contact information with the shop in hope they might get more. When the call finally came, they told him they had no shirts but they did had a bunch of Star Wars iron-ons. To which Ryan replied, “What’s an iron-on?” These novel items for this pre-iron-on-era college freshman sparked a great business idea. He tracked down about 20,000 vintage iron-ons from a shop that went out of business, paid about 8 cents a piece, bought a bunch of blank, dead stock T-shirts for $2 each and an industrial heat press to affix them. He sold the shirts online with images like The Dukes of Hazzard, Ghostbusters and Led Zeppelin Continued on page 12 Modern Manor

S The baby blue 1946 Marketeer electric car is one of the Durkin's favorite finds. It is actually titled as a two-door coupe.