Wheaton bookstore’s new location offers ‘cozy and homey feeling’

Cookbooks and cooking events have been a keystone of Sandy Koropp’s 10-year journey as owner of Prairie Path Books in Wheaton.

So the possibility of having a full kitchen on the first floor of a two-story house in the city’s downtown helped clinch Koropp’s decision when she considered a relatively spontaneous move from a Wheaton shopping center.

“Really, the kitchen probably was the reason I moved,” said Koropp, whose bookstore is now located at 107 W. Willow Ave.

“It felt like home to me, and I like to have my work and home collide in all the best ways,” Koropp said. “So it’s going to smell like love; as my Grandma put it, a house needs to smell like love.”

Signing a lease on Dec. 12, she closed her doors at Wheaton’s Town Square shopping center on Dec. 24 and started packing on Christmas Day.

“I work all the time,” said Koropp, who had nothing but nice things to say about Town Square and its management. But the lure of a home setting drew her in.

After an initial VIP subscriber event on Jan. 6, Prairie Path Books opened at its new location on Jan. 10.

More intimate than the space in Town Square that Prairie Path Books occupied for nearly five years, it’s a fully realized version of her initial store in a model apartment in the former Toms-Price Home Furnishings store near the Wheaton Public Library.

Prairie Path Books debuted in that space in June 2014. It was a symbiotic relationship between Koropp, who transitioned from hosting cookbook demonstrations in her Wheaton home, and Toms-Price, which received foot traffic.

Her cooking events, such as one that already is full on Feb. 25 with Coinneach MacLeod, author of “The Hebridean Baker at Home,” routinely sell out.

Within the tastefully designed and freshly painted interiors of the circa-1905 building, Prairie Path Books specializes in fiction, new releases, children’s and young adult books, self-development, women’s features, gift cards and “a whole lot of cookbooks,” Koropp said.

“Only the best,” she said.

Koropp offers two yearly $150 six-month “VIP” memberships with special benefits and opportunities, hosts five annual book recommendation parties, plus monthly meetings of the “Skinny Book Club,” fiction works of around 200 pages or less.

With a porch and a front yard, she hopes to offer outdoor events when the weather warms.

She had no intention of moving from Town Square until visiting a woman who was a customer at Prairie Path Books, and the two became friends — Linda Kurtz, who moved her business, Day Street Designs, to a sunny, second-floor office at 107 W. Willow Ave.

Visiting Kurtz’s studio, Koropp saw the first-floor space, thought it’d be great for a bookstore, and started the wheels in motion.

“She wanted a cozy and homey feeling where people are comfortable to come and talk about books but are also a community,” said Kurtz, who did some of the staging and design of the new store. “She likes to do events, and I think just bringing people together is really important to Sandy. It’s about the books, but it’s also about the community.”

Koropp practiced transactional law before she left her practice to raise her three children with her husband, Dave Koropp. The two were sweethearts at York Community High School in Elmhurst.

After about 12 years away, armed with her recipe books, she started Prairie Path Books.

Now feeling the itch to resume her law practice, Koropp wound up leasing one of the three upstairs offices, where her neighbors are Kurtz and Lesley Whitehead Photography. Koropp is working on continuing legal education to reinstate her license.

“I like the feel of a Wheaton lawyer upstairs from her bookshop,” she said.