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Detective turned detailer makes sports cars shine

Detective turned detailer makes sports cars shine

Corey Thomen owns and operates Mountain Detail in Falls Village.

Patrick L. Sullivan

FALLS VILLAGE — Up in the hills of Falls Village, in what looks like the ordinary garage of an ordinary home, Corey Thomen might be working on a $3 million car.

On receiving this information, a visiting reporter took a few steps back, lest he ding the car, which is a 1967 Lamborghini Miura.

Thomen, a retired New Milford police detective, runs Mountain Detail. He specializes in what he calls advanced paint correction, ceramic coatings and other things that do not occur to the average Subaru owner.

Thomen said he got his start as a teenager working in a detail shop in Torrington.

He also served for 20 years in the New Milford police department, rising to detective and putting in three years as school resource officer.

While with the NMPD, Thomen earned a degree that allowed him to start work as a counselor at Mountainside Treatment Center in North Canaan after he retired from the police.

Not that he retired per se. Thomen said he works 60-80 hours per week. After leaving the police, he built the home and work space in Falls Village, went to work at Mountainside, and started Mountain Detail.

The detailing business is by appointment only. The work is painstaking, expensive, and slow. And he’s booked up for a while.

“This is for people who don’t think of their car as an appliance,” he said with considerable understatement.

“There’s no judgment on a car. It depends on what the client wants.”

Shining bright lights on a Porsche he was working on, he used words like “smooth,” “rich” and “glossy.”

Thomen’s wife, Sarah, works as a nurse at the University of Connecticut and at Sharon Hospital. They have two sons, Ian and Gabriel, at Lee H. Kellogg School.

Thomen looked at the Lamborghini, which seemed to glow even without extra lighting.

He also found a photo of his son working on a car and showed it to the reporter.

“I am blessed to have people in my life to be supportive,” he said.

Patrick L. Sullivan
Senior Reporter
Patrick Sullivan has been a reporter for The Lakeville Journal since 2004, covering everything from town meetings to local characters and the outdoors. He grew up in Northern Virginia but spent summers on Mount Riga in Salisbury, giving him a lifelong connection to the Northwest Corner. A graduate of Denison University, Patrick is also the author of Tangled Lines, the newspapers’ popular fly-fishing column—making The Lakeville Journal, as far as anyone knows, the only newspaper in Connecticut with a regular fly-fishing columnist. He once received a fan letter from England, which he considers sufficient evidence that his work has achieved international acclaim.

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