The owners of Embellishments of Steamboat Springs were ready for the start of a busy holiday week, but instead were meeting with fire investigators Monday and grappling with the impacts of a fire that occurred early Sunday.

Steamboat Springs Fire Rescue responded to an alarm set off on an interior smoke detector at the Embellishments location at 903 Lincoln Ave. Firefighters arrived at 1:22 a.m. to see flames and smoke coming out a window on the Ninth Street side of the building.

“I didn’t respond, but the captain that did saw a fire in one of the display windows along the street,” said Doug Shaffer, fire marshal with Steamboat Springs Fire Rescue. “It was still a small fire. They were able to put it out quickly and then do a little bit of a mop-up and that sort of thing, and were on-scene for an hour, an hour-and-a-half.”

Jason Edinburg, whose wife Ashley co-owns the business with her mother Melinda Miller, was thankful for the quick response by Steamboat Springs firefighters. He said while the flames were contained to a display window, the real damage was caused by the resulting smoke.

“I honestly believe that (the fire damage itself) is not a big deal and can be taken care of,” Edinburg said. “It’s the smoke damage that is going to be the biggest problem.”

Edinburg said the timing could not have been worse for the business.

“The place was looking amazing,” Edinburg said of the store “Ashley and her team had the store looking beautiful. They spent the entire month, from the end of October and into November, just decorating for Christmas.”

Jason and Ashley are still hopeful that the work they put into getting the store ready for the holidays will not go to waste.

“It’s kind of devastating,” Edinburg said. “Hopefully it won’t be for naught, but it seems at this point that it’s not going to be able to have the same impact that we’ve had in the past.”

Edinburg said after meeting with Shaffer he sees almost no chance that the store will reopen this week. He expects the insurance company to come in and do its own investigation, and that will have to happen before he can bring in a remediation company to clean up. Right now there is no timeline.

“There was quite a bit of smoke damage, so there is probably going to be a continuing investigation as far as the insurance company is concerned, so I’ll probably be leaving it as ‘under investigation’ for a longer period,” Shaffer said. “We can say that there were Christmas lights in the area near the origin of the fire — but it’s still under investigation.”