Designers Re-employ Vintage Factory Equipment in Urban Interiors

In recent years, new urban living spaces have been created from buildings originally constructed as offices or factories. To compliment these interiors, vintage industrial elements are being reclaimed and reworked to serve new purposes.

For the last 25 years, the antiques market enthusiastically embraced the fashion for recycled architectural elements and store furnishings. Now collectors and designers are turning to industrial salvage. Equipment and fittings pulled from urban factories appear at mainstream antiques shows, mixed and matched with more traditional furniture and decorative arts.

At the January 2007Americana @ the Piers show in New York City, the tag on a table with wheels read: “Stunning art form that is functional as well.” Exhibitor David Leggett, who works with wife Kim, said, “That’s an old piece of bowling alley floor put on the wheel set-up for a hay rake. Somebody made it into a cart - it’s been that way for a long time. I call it a coffee table.”

The table is a perfect example of good industrial design because it has both an attractive aesthetic and is still functional enough to transport a generator. Such rolling tables, gear-framed mirrors, and metal bins fit easily into edgy loft settings with slate floors, concrete walls and steel appliances.

The Leggetts also produce a line of inventive lighting created from salvage and scrap metal. One involves iron spirals that David took off rolls of metal, with a naked bulb at the base. These can be hung singly or in clusters. “David has a great ability to put together what I see,” Kim said. The results have been featured in catalog shots for cabinetmaker Thos. Moser’s hand-crafted furniture, and the couple’s design mix has attracted attention from major shelter publications, including Architectural Digest.

“We had a fantastic show at the Piers – we sold all of the lighting,” Kim noted. “One of our best-selling items, which we can’t find anymore, has been driving-range ball baskets coated in rubber. If we had a hundred of those, we could sell them. The lights are all minimal in design; the basket becomes the cage.”

One customer for their lighting was interior designer Marsha Russell, who as Satinwood Ltd. operates in and around New York. “I was particularly interested in lighting when I was at that show,” she said, “and also ‘industrial plumbing,’ if you will. At various Pier shows, I purchased a number of slate sinks – really heavy, very large, sort of industrial looking – for a client who really wants to have that feeling in a house.”

The look does not just apply to singles lofts. “We have a client who has three children and one on the way, and we did her kitchen and family room. You wouldn’t walk in and say it’s industrial, but it has a masculine sense to it,” Russell said.
“It’s a fairly large space with a palette of grays and browns, fairly large pieces of furniture, and antiques mixed with transitional. The hardware that we chose for the kitchen and the lighting has a definite industrial feel to it – it looks new in a good way.”

She likes to use industrial elements when she can: “I love the earthiness of it, the texture, the scale – in the right place, there’s nothing quite like it. It involves a reinvention of these objects; they can be reworked – or not. But they are used in a different way, in a different room, in a home versus a factory.”

The fashion for wide-open condominiums and warehouse conversions began on the East and West Coasts and has spread steadily inland. Rather than taking his things on the road, designer Keith Merry of Garden Park Antiques works out of a 25,000-square-foot showroom and workshop with metal forge and paint room on the edge of Nashville. He has the necessary skills to alter industrial material for domestic use: “We manufacture fine iron work. So I have the ability to create this look – I’ve really become a furniture designer.”

The firm’s website, gardenpark.com, features a large inventory of fancy antique iron and architecturals, as well as his industrial constructions from salvaged materials. Merry constantly searches for interesting elements that can be transformed into furniture. “I’m always looking for unusual pieces out of factories that I can convert. I do incredible coffee tables out of old palettes with wheels,” he said, “I sold over 200 that came out of a factory. They’re all gone and I’m starting to manufacture a line of new ones using vintage wood.”

The dealer has seen the style spread. “I was selling this stuff up to Chicago, New York, and Miami, but nobody in Nashville wanted it. We seemed to be five to 10 years behind the big metropolitan cities when it came to style. But all of a sudden – out of nowhere – lofts are popping up. In the big cities, they have old buildings and real lofts. Here they’re building brand new skyscrapers and calling them lofts.”

Merry acknowledged the popularity of this trend. “Everybody wants to furnish in that kind of look now – sleek, modern, clean urban style. What’s great is, there is such a large resource of industrial salvage. To go out and buy architecturals – terra cotta and ironwork and wood corbels – is harder today than it was 20 years ago when I started. Everybody knows what it is, and they want top dollar for it. There’s just so much out there you can get your hands on. Once this industrial style furniture started to catch hold, it opened up a brand new market for me.

“And it’s something I personally love,” he said. Like dealer Rick Ege (see sidebar), Merry favored a leaner look: “In the 1980s, excess was the in thing – the more you could pile in a room the better, sort of a Ralph Lauren look. But in design school they taught us, less is more. I didn’t really understand that for years and I went through the phase of putting everything on a piece of furniture I could. Now, the less I do, the better. Industrial pieces can speak on their own. You just have to present them well.”

Few homeowners have a forge like Merry’s, so reworking such factory finds may or may not be a do-it-yourself project, depending on your skills as an electrician, carpenter or blacksmith. The process can become more involved than attaching grandma’s sewing machine legs to a wooden board. An eye for possibilities is also important – presentation is everything for these salvaged pieces. An industrial table stuck in a basement is just a workbench, but refashioned and properly lit, it can be turned into the dramatic focus of a dining room.

Proof that this material has moved beyond urban areas into the suburbs and vacation homes can be seen in the book, Urban Country Style, by Nancy Gent and Elizabeth Betts Hickman, published last April by Gibbs-Smith and available on amazon.com. Merry contributed images to the volume.

SIDEBAR: Rick Ege, titan of industrial salvage

St. Louis dealer Rick Ege introduced industrial salvage into his eclectic mix of antique and modern objects almost 20 years ago. In a recent interview with Style Century Magazine, he said, “It was easy! There were others of us that were buying it – it wasn’t like it was unheard of. But there were no magazines, no buzz. And it was hard to sell – you could only sell it to a few people.”

Ege displays his wares at a few antique shows during the year, including the well-known February Heart of Country event in Nashville. But the best place to absorb his sense of style is inside his restored mercantile building in the city’s historic Soulard district, just around the corner from the aggressively industrial-looking Anheuser-Busch brewery.

“Industrial stuff you have to be open to buying anywhere. You never know what you’re going to find. Maybe a factory that closed down after being in operation for a hundred years – you find something they had thrown in the back room. Other pieces may have been used more recently, especially in industrial cities like St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati and Cleveland,” he said.

“If you look at a work bench, it’s a slab on a shoe foot – the basic form for a 16th-century Italian work table. If you really analyze this stuff, it’s basic forms that we see repeated because they’re a logical design. What’s changed is the idea that you would use the industrial version in your loft or second house rather than the antique work bench.”

According to Ege, “Age is not as important as functionality and design. There used to be a certain cachet if something was 200 years old; now it can be 30 years old if it’s by the right industrial designer. That’s pretty exciting. Some of this stuff is mysterious and romantic, and you wonder, what was it used for? You can’t say that about a new table you buy at Pottery Barn.”

Looking around the shop, it is easy to appreciate the accuracy of Ege’s inner eye, which allows him to mix industrial with decorative, fine art with folk, and American objects with European imports. A tall butcher block table on red metal factory legs supports a 19th-century Dutch cork diorama, while a pair of geometric floor lamps from a lodge stand nearby. Ege pointed to a rack of doll head molds: “Fabulous patina, great surface, gutsy, they look like modern art. That piece bridges the gap between art and design.

“We’re moving back to an era I came out of, the simpler time of the ’70s, when things were more streamlined,” said Ege. “And I think we’re moving back to a sense of clarity. Our lives are really busy, so we should focus on simple forms with great surfaces and interesting patina – but not a sense of fuss. It promotes clean and clear thinking.”

Ege has seen a strong response to his material. “I’m constantly reaching an audience that did not walk into antique shops a few years ago ... people you don’t think of as the traditional customer. That’s what’s changing in our business. The lines are blurring between gallery and shop,” he said.

“Industrial says something about who you are. You’re not copying a period in the past ... a watered-down version of something that was beautiful 200 years ago. Industrial is honest. It was made for a specific purpose, and it’s now being re-purposed in an exciting way.”