Bill Raymer of Restoration Resources
© Holly Rike 2017, All rights reserved.
“I’ve always loved to take things apart and put them back together,” Bill Raymer says when asked how he got into the salvaging industry. Disassembling and reconstructing goes to the heart of his South End business, Restoration Resources, a 7,000-square-foot showroom and warehouse filled with thousands of mostly architectural pieces that Raymer has rescued from demolitions and remodeling projects.
Everything here has a story. There is a massive wooden table from Boston Public Library, windows from Symphony Hall, phone booths from an old Eastie dive bar and towering columns that once stood outside a historic home in West Roxbury. Sometimes the pieces arrive in, well, pieces—or otherwise worse for wear—but they are painstakingly restored for sale by Raymer and his righthand man, Walter Santory, inside Restoration’s snug workroom.
Raymer is interested in big, sturdy, largely structural pieces. You won’t find kitchenette sets or upholstered love seats here. “We’re not a furniture store,” Raymer says. Ironically, the Washington Street space was, in a past life, a furniture store, and the space sits over an old fallout shelter. (Inside are boxes of ration crackers dated 1962. Raymer managed to move a couple on eBay.)
Nearly everything inside the cavernous building is for sale—or for rent, for photo shoots or Boston-set film productions. “Almost every motion picture that comes through town, the set decorators know to come here,” Raymer says.
Raymer has become a go-to guy for many of New England’s top designers and amateur do-it-yourselfers too. They hunt through his hoards to find one-of-a-kind relics that can be used as new interior fixtures. When Raymer set up shop in 1988, leaving behind a career in architectural printing and graphic arts, nearly all his business revolved around providing parts for historic restoration projects. Now about half of sales are for new construction or repurposed design elements, says Raymer, who attributes much of the change to trends set by HGTV-style shows.
Restoration Resources does repurpose some pieces itself—mostly smaller saleable items, like wine stoppers made from antique doorknobs and candle holders made from 150-year-old Beacon Hill brownstone stair balusters. Inside Circa, a gentleman’s parlor-like event space housed inside the showroom, a large bar is constructed from a combo of wall wainscoting, fireplace mantel and wooden bookcase. Circa can be rented for private parties, but Restoration also uses it to host DIY workshops and other experiences. On May 6, as part of ArtWeek Boston, Circa will host a Q&A panel of salvage design experts, including Nantucket’s Leslie Linsley, who’ll be signing copies of her new book Salvage Style, and local designer Brendan Haley.
Haley has turned to Restoration Resources for a number of projects, like the Milton restaurant Steel & Rye, where the host station was made from mailboxes, and Brookline’s Fairsted Kitchen, where wooden arch spandrels were repurposed as dining booth dividers.
In fact, restaurant work has become big business for Raymer—no surprise, with new venues popping up in Boston all the time. In one corner of the warehouse, Raymer points out massive iron chandeliers he retrieved from Union Bar and Grille, a now-closed restaurant that stood down the street; right under the chandeliers is a stockpile of salvaged iron radiators, some of which were used for the design of La Motta’s, the very restaurant that replaced Union.
And there you have it, the salvager’s circle of life: Break apart—then build anew.
Everything Old Is New Again
Three locals turn old designs into treasured objects.
By Scott Kearnan | Photo By Holly Rike | April 21, 2017
Dave Waller of Brickyard VFX
Dave Waller appreciates the art of grabbing attention. That’s evident from the work of Brickyard VFX, his Leather District agency that expertly creates Hollywood-level visual effects used in everything from Cadillac and Comcast advertisements to museum installations. And it’s evident from his personal passion as a collector of more than 200 vintage neon signs: big bulb-equipped beasts that scream various slogans and names of iconic New England businesses, theaters and products. One sign came from Ellis the Rim Man, a defunct, famed Allston auto shop. Another, advertising a pair of booty-popping dancers in high heels, came from Club 66—a strip club that inhabited the red light-tinged Combat Zone, not far from where Brickyard now stands.
“I love that each is unique and one-of-a-kind,” Waller says, noting that he’s had a soft spot for these signs ever since he rescued his first, which he found while riding his bike by a junkyard at age 9. Today he loads otherwise dump-destined discards (and occasional auction wins) into his flatbed pickup truck, amassing a cache of regional history along the way. “I’ve also come to appreciate that each sign is just a stepping-off point for connecting the history of what a place meant to people.”
Waller remembers once showing up to a West Roxbury football field with a glowing neon sign he got from a late local fried chicken restaurant. The glowing 12-foot-tall neon hen—wearing an apron and beckoning with one outstretched wing—won plenty of fans and smiles. “It was probably a lot of people’s first date spot,” Waller says, pleased. He clearly got the biggest charge of all.
Other neon artifacts earn new life as decor in Boston-area restaurants, from an old-school pharmacy sign that hangs in Harvard Square’s farm-to-table hit Alden & Harlow to a tuxedo shop sign that brightens the dining room of West End Johnnie’s. For Waller, signs are central to a broader interior aesthetic based on salvaged items. The 8,000-square-foot Brickyard VFX office, housed inside a 100-year-old former factory, makes use of an 1860-built mahogany desk from the U.S. customhouse in Bath, Maine (so massive it was installed by crane), a bar taken from the old Charley’s Saloon on Newbury Street, reclaimed parking garage windows, machine shop doors—and, of course, signs from Scollay Square and the old Exeter Street Theatre.
Even Waller’s own home is repurposed. He and his wife live in a former fire station in Malden. They temporarily disassembled its brick facade to install the 30-foot-long Apple Tree Diner car, a former Dedham roadside-dining cart that they now use as a home office. Steel from the MBTA’s old, elevated Orange Line was reused to build stairs and walkways, and a token booth is outfitted as a DJ booth for house parties.
Right now, Waller is most excited to be working with Beyond Walls, a public art initiative in his hometown of Lynn, on plans to gussy up the gritty downtown using neon signs from his private collection. It’s a poignant project that brings his passion-provoking childhood bike ride full circle.
By Scott Kearnan | Photo By Holly Rike
Bruce Rosenbaum of ModVic
“Resilience” is an important word to Bruce Rosenbaum. It saw him through the early loss of his father and his own battle with Hodgkin lymphoma. And it aided him through dire financial straits when he and his wife, Melanie, sunk more than a million dollars into restoring and modernizing a 20-room, 1877-built Victorian Italianate home in North Attleboro—right before the market crashed, forcing them to return it to the bank unsold.
It’s also the word that draws Rosenbaum, an artist, designer and entrepreneur, to his signature aesthetic: steampunk, a funky, science fiction-inspired marriage of 19th-century machinery and modern technology. Recall the stylish gizmos imagined by authors Jules Verne and H.G. Wells or depicted in The Wild Wild West, one of Rosenbaum’s favorite TV series as a child.
“Steampunk is all about resilience,” Rosenbaum says. “You look at objects the way you might look at a situation, saying, ‘Time has passed us by, so we need to adapt, change and evolve in order to thrive and survive.’ It’s about being a creative problem solver.”
In 2007, he and his wife founded the design firm ModVic. Their clients commission functional designs that make innovative use of their arsenal of antiques—most procured through fairs and online auctions—and steampunk sensibility. For Wooster Street Social Club, the tattoo parlor setting of TLC’s reality show NY Ink, the Rosenbaums repurposed a 1907 industrial gas pump as a tattooing station, retrofitting it with a camera and a flat-screen monitor so customers could watch the tattoo artist work on their back. Behind the front desk at the Nantucket Hotel + Resort, gears inside a ModVic-made 6-foot-long metal whale flap a wooden tail while a security camera in the blowhole keeps watch over the lobby. And at Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge, guests are greeted outside by a 25-foot tall, 6,000-pound steel, copper and bronze armillary—an old-fashioned astronomical tool—made from 100-year-old mill gears and high-tech, color-shifting LED lights with help from frequent collaborator Salmon Studios, a metal fabricator in Western Mass.
“Something goes on in my brain when I come up with projects that integrate art and technology,” Rosenbaum says. He likes to wax cerebral about steampunk, citing neuroscience research about increased dopamine levels in brains exposed to art that combines familiar forms with unexpected novelties. “I go on these quests to find relevant objects that will touch people on an emotional level.”
His work has brought him national renown in steampunk circles. Ironically, he had never even heard the word until friends ascribed it to his home, a 1901 Victorian Craftsman in Sharon. Among the fantastical wonders inside: an antique pump organ repurposed as a computer workstation, a copper water heater that now dispenses filtered H2O into doggie bowls, a fireplace mantel and insert reimagined as framing for a home theater system—and lots of whirring doodads, doohickeys and thingamajigs.
Now Rosenbaum, who will appear at Waltham’s annual Watch City Steampunk Festival on May 13, is undertaking one of his biggest projects yet. He and his wife recently sold their Sharon home to purchase a 9,000-square-foot, 1876-built Gothic church in Palmer, with plans to convert it into a living, working and gallery space they hope will turn the old mill town into “the capital for steampunk in America.” Full steam ahead.
By Scott Kearnan | Photo By Holly Rike
Bill Raymer of Restoration Resources
© Holly Rike 2017, All rights reserved.
“I’ve always loved to take things apart and put them back together,” Bill Raymer says when asked how he got into the salvaging industry. Disassembling and reconstructing goes to the heart of his South End business, Restoration Resources, a 7,000-square-foot showroom and warehouse filled with thousands of mostly architectural pieces that Raymer has rescued from demolitions and remodeling projects.
Everything here has a story. There is a massive wooden table from Boston Public Library, windows from Symphony Hall, phone booths from an old Eastie dive bar and towering columns that once stood outside a historic home in West Roxbury. Sometimes the pieces arrive in, well, pieces—or otherwise worse for wear—but they are painstakingly restored for sale by Raymer and his righthand man, Walter Santory, inside Restoration’s snug workroom.
Raymer is interested in big, sturdy, largely structural pieces. You won’t find kitchenette sets or upholstered love seats here. “We’re not a furniture store,” Raymer says. Ironically, the Washington Street space was, in a past life, a furniture store, and the space sits over an old fallout shelter. (Inside are boxes of ration crackers dated 1962. Raymer managed to move a couple on eBay.)
Nearly everything inside the cavernous building is for sale—or for rent, for photo shoots or Boston-set film productions. “Almost every motion picture that comes through town, the set decorators know to come here,” Raymer says.
Raymer has become a go-to guy for many of New England’s top designers and amateur do-it-yourselfers too. They hunt through his hoards to find one-of-a-kind relics that can be used as new interior fixtures. When Raymer set up shop in 1988, leaving behind a career in architectural printing and graphic arts, nearly all his business revolved around providing parts for historic restoration projects. Now about half of sales are for new construction or repurposed design elements, says Raymer, who attributes much of the change to trends set by HGTV-style shows.
Restoration Resources does repurpose some pieces itself—mostly smaller saleable items, like wine stoppers made from antique doorknobs and candle holders made from 150-year-old Beacon Hill brownstone stair balusters. Inside Circa, a gentleman’s parlor-like event space housed inside the showroom, a large bar is constructed from a combo of wall wainscoting, fireplace mantel and wooden bookcase. Circa can be rented for private parties, but Restoration also uses it to host DIY workshops and other experiences. On May 6, as part of ArtWeek Boston, Circa will host a Q&A panel of salvage design experts, including Nantucket’s Leslie Linsley, who’ll be signing copies of her new book Salvage Style, and local designer Brendan Haley.
Haley has turned to Restoration Resources for a number of projects, like the Milton restaurant Steel & Rye, where the host station was made from mailboxes, and Brookline’s Fairsted Kitchen, where wooden arch spandrels were repurposed as dining booth dividers.
In fact, restaurant work has become big business for Raymer—no surprise, with new venues popping up in Boston all the time. In one corner of the warehouse, Raymer points out massive iron chandeliers he retrieved from Union Bar and Grille, a now-closed restaurant that stood down the street; right under the chandeliers is a stockpile of salvaged iron radiators, some of which were used for the design of La Motta’s, the very restaurant that replaced Union.
And there you have it, the salvager’s circle of life: Break apart—then build anew.
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