She had a burgeoning sales career but lacked a sense of direction. So she left it to start her own antiques importing business. Now, she has . . . : A Life Fulfilled

Kim Mascheroni has been in the antiques business for only five years, but already she has opened four California stores and has her sights set on the rest of the country.

People who wander into her West Hollywood shop, full of solidly luminous old Chinese pieces, tend to make all the wrong assumptions about the owner.

“She’s obviously an expert--and of course she’s Asian,” huffed one local design guru, who’s never met Mascheroni but assumes that anyone who can find and import such Sino-elegance must belong to the culture from which it comes, and has scholarly knowledge of the subject. Mascheroni, 40, is neither an expert nor an Asian. Until she was 35, she had never even been out of the country. And she knew zilch about the fine points of any furniture, let alone items exotic.

For the first two decades of her working life, all her mileage was logged on L.A. freeways: up before dawn, kiss the husband and kids goodbye, drive off to a succession of exhausting jobs she now says she naively regarded as satisfying.

These days, she hikes through rice paddies in Indonesia, converses with monks in Tibet, spouts the names and locations of remote Chinese provinces and the rare old woods and lacquers she finds there.

She spends half the year out of the country, buying treasures with which to stock her Kim3 stores; the other half is spent building her business at home. She glows with a sense of professional purpose and satisfaction, not to mention bliss of a more personal nature. On July 15, on the island of Fiji, she married Soren Kieler, the Danish shoe tycoon and antiques collector who “magically” appeared in her life and inadvertently led her to reinvent herself.

Mascheroni’s life, as she recounts it, has unfolded like an old Joan Collins prime-time soap, full of familial havoc, unplumbed emotion, unstoppable inner drive--and in the last five years, great dollops of romance and glamour.

Although she did not always know exactly where she wanted to go, she was always hell-bent on getting there.

“I had a ladder inside myself that I was climbing,” she says, “and nothing could stop me.”

If Mascheroni’s tale teaches anything about working in America at the millennium, it’s that part of the old-fashioned Dream is not dead: Even someone who started work at 14, who never went to college, who spent the first 20 years of her adult life selling shoes . . . even such a person can suddenly discover in herself a totally unexpected “calling,” a career for which she has both great talent and great passion.

And she can succeed at it.

“Of course, the banks don’t think so. Not one would give me a loan,” she recalls, reeling off a list of financial institutions that have snubbed her. But what do banks know of passion?

Mascheroni opened the first of three, 8,000-square-foot shops in 1995, in Santa Barbara, featuring European and Asian imports. The all-Chinese store on Beverly Boulevard came in 1997. Last year, she debuted in Carmel Valley and opened a small showcase studio in Montecito. That one, close to her home, is meant to whet the appetites of visitors to the many elite resorts nearby.

“We show them the caliber of our merchandise and suggest they visit our other, larger shops to see more. The idea has increased our business a few hundredfold,” she says.

Making a Name in the Design World

Although she’s too new to be a household name in design circles, her reputation is hot and getting hotter. Tom Allardyce, of Hendrix-Allardyce Design in L.A., says that since Mascheroni came on the scene, he and his partner haven’t had to forage at as many auctions and obscure shops to find exquisite Asian pieces.

“She has an extremely refined and well-educated eye and offers such a diverse, surprising selection,” Allardyce says. “I’m delighted with every new shipment. The ancient woods she brings in are so mellowed by life and age that they blend perfectly with French, English or Italian furniture.”

Chicago-based designer Bruce Gregga also raves.

“She’s so new,” he says, “but she’s the Mighty Mite of this industry.” He is using some of her imports in homes in London, New York, San Francisco, Aspen and Hawaii.

Gregga lives part time in Santa Barbara, where he discovered Mascheroni.

“She’s wonderful because of the range of what she imports, from quite modest to absolutely fabulous pieces. And she’s there at exactly the right moment with the current resurgence in things Chinese.”

Mascheroni says she hunts out and handpicks every piece she brings into her shops and directs all restoration or refinishing in China.

“The ancient art of lacquering--and the lacquers themselves, which are made from rare tree saps and special pigments--could not be done anywhere except in certain parts of China,” she says.

Meg Ryan, Marcus Allen, Len Hill and Ellen DeGeneres are among celebrities recently mentioned as customers by a store salesperson, although Mascheroni refuses to name names of famous clients.

“Yes, we sell to celebrities, but I would never intrude on their privacy,” she says righteously, drawing her 112-pound frame to its full stature of 5 feet, 1 inch.

She was not always so svelte.

“Obesity is in my genes,” she says. “My mother and grandmother suffered from it.” Born in Inglewood to working parents (her mother was at banks for 35 years, her father at Coca-Cola), Mascheroni weighed more than 200 pounds by the time she hit adolescence and entered Chatsworth High.

She was not particularly interested in formal education. At 14, she started working after school in the stockroom at Kinney Shoes on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana. “They let me come out and sell in the evenings, and I was very, very good at it.” She stayed four years, then began an upwardly-mobile shoe sales spiral, managing Jay Jordan Shoes in Century City for three years before ascending to what she considered the pinnacle of shoe-dom: Nordstrom.

“I had to start at the beginning all over again, as a stock clerk in the Glendale store. But I knew the job would be worth it.”

By this time she had lost, regained and then lost 100 pounds again. She also (in 1980) had married the handsome Argentine co-worker she’d met at Kinney, and they began having children (Laura is now 18, Kenny 17 and Eric 13).

Nordstrom executives evidently saw Mascheroni’s potential. She says she quickly became a salesperson, then an assistant manager within 15 weeks. She managed at four branches for three years and was promoted to shoe buyer for the Santa Ana store. “I’d already had my first baby, and we had a house in Chatsworth. I drove from there to Santa Ana every day because I wanted that position.”

Climbing the Ladder at Nordstrom

Two years later, in 1989, she was promoted to merchandise manager of Nordstrom’s San Diego region.

“I was the first woman in the company to hold that position, and I supervised 16 buyers and 400 employees in four stores,” she says with pride.

Already, her travel schedule was ferocious. Although her husband and children eventually moved closer to her job, she recalls that she was almost always “on duty” for Nordstrom, or in New York on buying trips.

Her husband, George, “was the homebody, always there for the kids, always supervising and playing with them. I left early and came home late and tired.” She was on a treadmill, she knew, but success and large paychecks were seductive.

In 1993, she was promoted again, this time to the jewel in Nordstrom’s Southland crown: Orange County. After a year there, she received the fateful phone call. “The head office told me to get a passport, they were sending me to China.” She remembers the 15-hour plane ride to Hong Kong, and what she wore on April 5, 1994, on the boat ride to mainland China. “It was a Banana Republic outfit: green pants and a crisp white shirt. I got off the boat, not knowing what to expect, and there to greet me was this nice, sweet man who would later become my husband.”

Kieler, then 53, was a shoe manufacturer who listed Nordstrom among his clients. He met the boat as a courtesy, having offered to escort the new buyer through the factories and introduce her to the vagaries of doing business in China. It was a five-day trip, Mascheroni recalls, and it was “basically all work. Nothing dramatic happened.”

But she came home, realized her life “needed to take a vastly different direction” and moved out of her house two months later. She took an apartment close to her husband and children. “George was basically working four days a week; I was pretty much working seven. He had always taken care of the children while I was away. It wouldn’t have been fair to uproot them. In a divorce, someone has to move out of the house. There’s no reason it should always be the father.”

She and Kieler had their first date a month later, in June. In August, Kieler “broke off his relationship” with the woman he’d been seeing. In October, she quit her job at Nordstrom. “That was when everybody really thought I’d gone off the deep end. I had a fabulous job, was highly paid, and I didn’t have another job to go to. How could I have left my marriage and career and not even know where I was going?”

Indeed, how could she?

She has no simple answer. She says it suddenly dawned on her, after the China trip, that she didn’t really know who she was, or what she really needed. She had spent her life working nonstop in shoes, fighting the weight demons, trying to juggle job, house, family. After she moved out of the marriage, her fabulous job didn’t seem so fabulous or fulfilling. “The work and the marriage were all connected somehow. . . . I’m not able to explain it. I needed time to think just why I’d been doing everything I was doing.”

Starting Out in a New Business

She didn’t work for four months, couldn’t decide what to do. Kieler introduced her to a nephew in the antique pine business who wanted to move from the East Coast to California. The two became partners and left on a furniture-buying trip to Europe. She used some of the money accumulated in what she calls a “very substantial” 401(k) fund she’d built while at Nordstrom. They bought things from the Czech Republic and Denmark, then rented temporary space in Santa Barbara from which to sell them.

“We planned to stay open a few months, until we sold out, then take another buying trip and rent another short-term space to sell the next shipment.” But they sold out almost immediately. “We were so thrilled and excited, we left for Europe to replenish stock and do it again.”

Meanwhile Kieler, who spends much time in China and has relationships with antiques experts there, shipped a small container of Asian antiques to the pair.

“That was the beginning of the Asian thing,” Mascheroni recalls. “We realized it mixes beautifully with European. It added a sense of spirituality--and customers loved it.”

Mascheroni loved it too--more than the things from Europe, perhaps because China already had changed her life. She started traveling there. Kieler linked her up with his connections, who have shown her resources and tutored her in the history and subtleties of ancient Chinese furniture ever since. “I don’t pretend I’m an expert,” she says. “I say I sell fine and authentic antique furniture.” And it’s selling very well.

To maintain momentum, to keep new shipments pouring in, she has plowed “every cent” back into the business, she says. For a while, to keep costs low, she even delivered customers’ purchases personally, using a former U.S. Postal truck. She has only nine employees and says she knows “they hate it” when she asks them to chip in by doing menial chores they weren’t hired to do.

And she hopes to change all that. This is the first year she will show a profit, she says, and she can foresee that business will build quickly if she does things right.

But of course, there’s the rest of the country to conquer with her shops.

“My target cities are Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco,” she says firmly, as if she already has them staked out. “I can see it all now. By the time banks come asking if I need a loan, I’ll say: ‘You didn’t want me when I needed you, and now I don’t want you.’ ”

Bettijane Levine can be reached by e-mail at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.