Top It Yogurt Shoppe owner Ken Coman stands in front of his home-built, exact-size Titanic wall piece in his shop on Saturday, March 8.
Photo by Caroline Carr
SNOHOMISH — With ragtime music flowing and a faux stained glass facade, it is immediately clear that Top It Yogurt Shoppe on First Street is something special. Walking into the store, your eye instantly catches a massive floor-to-ceiling display that is unmistakably reminiscent of the RMS Titanic. With commanding stripes of yellow and black ending abruptly against a jagged edge, this piece stands tall as owner Ken Coman’s magnum opus.
Coman began building the model in his barn back in October of 2023 before moving it in. For over a year, the model has lived in the shop and customers watched it take shape. He completed the final touches in January.
“It’s honestly the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Coman said. The model is an exact-scale replica of the largest piece of the Titanic ever recovered. “The Big Piece,” as it is known, is a chunk of the ship’s starboard, or right side, hull.
It’s 13-feet-two-inches tall and stretches 24-feet-five-inches long with 1,015 3-D printed “rivets.”
During the 19-month process of building this model, Coman prioritized authenticity over speed.
The portholes seen on the model were contracted from Thomas Utley & Co., the English firm that created the portholes on the Titanic. This model uses the very same casts.
“You would not be able to distinguish them from a museum,” Coman said. The portholes are equipped with the same functional parts as the originals down to the star-stamped deadlight and 95-pound heft.
While the scale model is certainly the centerpiece,taking up nearly the entire right wall, the rest of the store is filled with bits of memorabilia and history. When you walk in, you’ll see a great, bronze bell cast in the very same mold as the one that rang out from the Titanic’s crow’s nest on April 14th, 1912. Along the left wall, you can find a wooden block from the RMS Olympic, ship blueprints signed by a survivor, a folded-up deck chair, a bulky life vest, and coal from the boiler room. Looking up from the yogurt station, you might recognize a replica of the wooden panel that saved Rose in James Cameron’s “Titanic” (1997).
Even as you exit the store, the experience continues 883 feet down First Street. On the sidewalk out front, you’ll notice chalk marks corresponding to the length and features of the Titanic deck.
If you don’t immediately recognize the Titanic-themed yogurt shop, you might know Top It from one of its many earlier iterations. Since Coman took over the store in 2021, it has undergone 11 full transformations. The interior and exterior have been done up to look like Paris, Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, a Celtic landscape and the set of a Star Wars movie, to name a few.
As Top It’s owner and a father of four, Coman does not have an abundance of free time but is committed to reinventing his store. For every theme, Coman would paint the windows accordingly, sometimes getting up as early as 3 a.m. to begin his intricate murals before the store opened. The current display is painted to reflect the stained-glass windows of the Titanic’s first-class lounge.
Though the store has been a revolving door of concepts, the effort put into the Titanic theme is far too great to tear down any time soon. Coman plans to add some final accents to the store’s furniture and let this most grandiose theme remain in-store for the foreseeable future.
A close-up of the wall piece inside Top-It Yogurt Shoppe in Snohomish photographed March 8, 2024.
