Doyennes of renewal

TRACY IDELL HAMILTON

At the end of Humbert Street in San Luis Obispo, where the pavement turns to gravel just this side of a grassy field, is Reunion, a small showroom and adjoining workshop.

It is here that Leeana Allen creates, and those in the know come to buy, furniture and home decorating accents that have been lovingly refurbished, restored, reimagined.

The showroom is full of vintage furnishings that have been created anew–not restored to their original form, but transformed into unique and useful pieces.

In one corner of the showroom sits what was originally a tiny child's dresser. When Allen found it, its top two drawers were damaged beyond repair. She removed them, added a single shelf in their place, and repainted the dresser. "I did it with Nintendo in mind," she says. The shelf is deep enough to hold the console, and the two remaining drawers will hide game cartridges, the cords, the controls.

The damaged drawer fronts, too, will take on a new life–as doors for a small hanging cabinet. "I'll just fix them, then add new hardware"–which really means vintage hardware, for Allen rarely buys anything new–"then paint it."

When finished, the cabinet will look rustic, antique. But it will be sturdy enough to outlast a similarly priced new cabinet–and whoever buys it will have a one-of-a-kind piece of craftsmanship in their home.

Made anew–not like new

For so long as people have discarded old, worn-out furniture, other people have rescued it. Some–those on a really tight budget, or those who care more about function than aesthetics–might just drag a chair or an old table left on the sidewalk into their house and call it done.

But others, like Allen, take old pieces and create them anew. Not like new, in the sense that every scratch or imperfection is buffed out, but new in a visionary way. Allen sees a Nintendo cabinet in a broken dresser, turns an armoire into an entertainment center.

Call it upscale second-hand, refurbished, eclectic, vintage. Call it what it really is: recycling. For many of the people who share this aesthetic, whether as buyers or sellers, there’s a philosophy behind the rescue, the repair, the re-use. For them, it's about treading lightly on the earth, about giving a new life to something that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill, about making art out of someone else's trash.

It's about not buying a cheaply-made, mass-produced table when there are millions of old tables out there just waiting for to be imbued with new life. It's about not throwing away something just because you're done with it, but instead giving it to a thrift store or even setting it beside the dumpster rather than tossing it inside. It's about using what you have, finding beauty in things old but not necessarily antique, adding small touches to fix something, make it useful, make it pretty.

This is recycling on a deeper level than just separating your bottles and cans. The movement, if that’s what it is, gained a huge boost over the last several years from two women–Martha Stewart, that modern purveyor of all things made-by-hand-but-stylish, and Rachel Ashwell, the name of whose once-small slipcover company, Shabby Chic, has turned into a shorthand description of the style.

A nod to Martha and Rachel

"Martha Stewart told middle-class women to have confidence with what [they] already [have], showed them how to practically and affordably create a style that's all their own," says Deanna Webster, owner of the Re-Entry Shoppe in Arroyo Grande.

Webster's shop, near the gazebo in old town Arroyo Grande, is a trove of Shabby Chic, of the eclectic and the recycled in all permutations. Outside and on the open, weathered porch, old benches and gliders sit in the sun among birdhouses and other garden accents made entirely from such found and recycled materials as old fencing, chicken wire, and bits of decorative molding.

Although she doesn't do her own refurbishing anymore, Webster sells mostly what she calls "eclectic vintage furnishings," which she offers along with antiques and old, faux-old, and old-into-new collectibles. She also carries a few things on consignment, and some original art, like the work of artist Army Verdusco, who paints on rescued window panes. "They're very popular," Webster says of Verdusco’s paintings.

Rachel Ashwell, who has created a Shabby Chic empire out of her how-to books and television specials, began by making slipcovers out of sturdy but beautiful fabrics so her children could climb over her couches and chairs without damaging them. Shabby Chic has since become a reigning aesthetic for everyone from Hollywood stars to people on a budget who want beauty, function and originality.

For Allen, the joy she feels in making something that was ugly beautiful, something that was not functional useful once again, is the core reason she does what she does. And while she has a personal philosophy about her avocation, she doesn't push it on her customers. "I don't market my things as recycled," she says. "But in my heart that's how I think of them."

Allen is fond of a quote by Mary Emmerling, another use-what-you-have decorating maven who has published more than a dozen decorating books, mainly on American Country style. "She said that economy offers creativity, and I love that idea," Allen says. "Everything doesn't have to match. But what it does need to do is match your lifestyle. Instead of appointing your house and saying 'doesn't this look nice, please don't touch anything,' your decorating style can serve the purposes of your life."

Allen even creates her own colors from mis-tinted paints she buys from paint dealers for a fraction of the cost of custom-tints. Right now she's working in a Tuscan palette of deep reds, golds, and mossy greens to go with the mainly white and neutral colors that are perennially popular.

About a third of her customers, Allen says, tell her that they, too, find joy in bringing home furniture that has been in some other family's house, in owning something recycled. Others may merely like the look of a paint-peeling window frame now holding a mirror, or a weathered old chest of drawers now on wheels with funky old pulls and a weathered finish.

Whatever their motives, Allen and Webster are glad so many people are buying what they may not even think about as recycled.

A peripatetic purveyor

Tammie–she uses only one name–is another local re-use artist who believes fervently in the philosophy behind her creations. Her company, Collard Greens, is a mobile one. Instead of showing her wares in a brick-and-mortar shop, Tammie sells them at antiques-and-collectibles street fairs up and down the state. (A few of her smaller decorative pieces can be found at Re-Entry and at Reunion.)

Tammie works out of her home and back yard, which is filled with raw materials she’ll use in her creations: stacks of old windows and weathered fenceposts, chairs without seats, rescued lengths of molding, rolls of wire, and, today, an old iron baby carriage. "That's going to be a planter when I get finished with it," she says.

Looking at an old, rusting baby carriage and seeing a planter, not trash, is what fires Tammie up about what she does. "I mean, how long [would] it take for that carriage to degrade in a landfill?" she asks.

"Or that table–" She points to a small coffee table in her living room. "That table had no top. It was garbage to someone because it didn't have a top." Tammie took part of an old oak door that someone had long ago stenciled with small, pale orange roses, affixed it to table, and repainted the base to match its new top. "Now it's this cool, functional, one-of-a-kind table," she says, running her hand over the delicate faded roses.

Tammie's entire house and yard are a testament to her philosophy. Along one side of her back yard fence there’s an old chicken feeder she turned it into a planter. Porcelain roosters peek out among the flowers. "They're Copely collectibles, but they're chipped," she says. "So they go into the garden." Tea cups and saucers, glued together atop slim copper pipes and filled with seeds, become bird feeders. A wreath of barbed wire entwined with bay leaves hangs from another part of the fence.

"It's all about recycling," she says, "about thinking about things in a different way. It used to just be about buying a brand new bedroom set. But Martha Stewart and Rachel Ashwell really opened it up. Now everyone has something old in their house."

Last weekend was the beginning of the selling season for Collard Greens. Three vans full of home and garden furniture and knickknacks sold in a single weekend.

Throughout the season, Tammie will work feverishly to keep up with demand, culling through flea markets and thrift stores and looking to a network of friends and "pickers"–people who go through dumpsters–for her raw materials. "I get it before it goes into the landfill," she says.

She admits that it's a lot of work to find the raw materials she uses for her creations. "You have to go out every day," she says. But doing the actual creation, or re-creation, is more like art than work. "I don't call it work. I just get to create things. It just feels really good to give something a second life…or a third or fourth life," she says, smiling.

Those who know her work agree. Like Allen at Reunion, Collard Greens has a following, people who’ve bought a piece or two in the past and now seek her out when she comes to town.

"When you sell something so unique to someone, you develop a relationship with them. They look for you, to tell you how the table looks in their kitchen–you're selling a piece of you. Your energy goes into everything you make."

The world of refurbished home furnishings is a small one, especially in a town the size of San Luis Obispo. "We all know each other," says Allen, "and we're each kind of doing our own version of it, which means we can support each other rather than compete."

So the next time you're thinking of adding a piece of furniture to your home, or of discarding something you're done with, think recycle, re-use, re-imagine, instead. Give that old item to a thrift store instead of tossing it.

"Or call us," says Webster. "A lot of people don't know what they have. And just because they're finished with it–you know what they say, one man's trash is another man's treasure."

Staff writer Tracy Hamilton is one of those aesthetically- and fiscally-challenged people who finds stuff off the street and just sticks it in her apartment.