Summer Vacation 
The Handmades’ Tale
Want a whimsical forged-iron gate? an imposing limestone fireplace? a sleek pecan table? these twelve texas artisans are making tomorrow’s heirlooms today.
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AFTER GETTING OUT OF COLLEGE WITH A DEGREE IN ARCHITECTURE, I decided I needed to know what happens behind the wall,” says 46-year-old Austinite Lars Stanley. So for his internship, instead of chaining himself to a drafting table, he signed on to help build the home of one of his architecture professors at Texas A&M. The rigors of real-life, on-site design gave him a deep appreciation for the straightforward Arts and Crafts style and for the Japanese tradition in which a structure’s designer is its builder. Refusing to follow the path of most architects, who, he says, are “isolated from the contractor legally and conceptually,” he worked as a carpenter’s helper and a cabinetmaker. His interior designer mother and architect father would ask him, “What are you doing?” Stanley remembers. For a while, he wasn’t sure himself.
He tried his hand at wood carving, and in the seventies, the high cost of chisels and gouges ultimately led him to California and the late Alex Weygers, a blacksmithing guru who would teach him, among other things, to forge his own tools from old car parts and scrap metal. He began to collect yesterday’s “medium-tech” tools of smithing—giant trip-hammers, ancient drill presses and buffers—which he considers “beautiful sculptural things in their own right.” And he never stopped making things.
Two decades later, Stanley’s multiple disciplines have firmly coalesced. He and his parents recently worked together on the design of El Paso’s award-winning Franklin High School, and he is currently expanding the campus of a Waldorf school outside Austin. His signature “lotus” andirons, so hefty it takes two people to lift them, grace the hearths of celebrities including Richard Gere and Steven Spielberg and the pages of shelter magazines like Metropolitan Home. He teaches blacksmithing at Austin Community College and to a few lucky apprentices at his appealing studio in South Austin.
One of Stanley’s proudest achievements is the fantastical iron gate that greets visitors to Austin’s Zilker Botanical Gardens. Made in collaboration with metalsmith Louis Herrera, Jr., the gate reflects the notions of the various gardening groups who volunteer at the park. They wanted their gardens protected from marauding after-hours vandals but cringed at the plain-Jane gate the city’s parks department had designed. Now they’ve got a gate so full of permanent plant life—a live oak, a mountain laurel, a prickly pear cactus, and more—it threatens to outshine the gardens themselves.
Lars Stanley Architects, P.O. Box 3095, Austin 78764 (512-445-0444). Stanley’s repertoire includes light fixtures ($50 to $5,000), enormous andirons ($1,000 to $4,000), and tables and benches ($1,000 to $10,000).
Rockers
IT’S RAINING, AND THE ROOF IS LEAKING at Carlos CortEs’ open-air shop in the middle of San Antonio’s King William district. The concrete is slow to cure in this weather, but Cortés is at work on a bench. Its details are just barely beginning to take shape on its steel-and-wire frame, and at this stage it looks more like a mistake than an artful creation. “Concrete work takes a leap of faith,” says Cortés, who is forty. I may be short on faith but my vision is excellent, and I’ve already seen completed examples of Cortés’ wizardry with concrete. Once he’s sculpted knots, scratched grain, and bored wormholes into the concrete using a variety of bizarre-looking homemade tools, then colored it with mineral stains, I don’t just believe, I know it will look exactly as if it were made of logs and split planks.
This concrete trickery is in Cortés’ blood. Beginning in the twenties, his father, Maximo Cortés, and his great-uncle Dionisio Rodríguez decorated the southern landscape with bridges, park benches, gazebos, fences, and arches made from concrete “logs.” Examples of their monumental work still stand in San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park and at Stonewerks restaurant across from the Alamo Quarry Market (formerly the Alamo Cement plant, where Rodríguez was once employed). Initially Cortés didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps. “I remember helping Dad on weekends when I would rather have been out playing,” he says. “I always wanted to be a doctor. But I sort of absorbed everything, even though I didn’t even know I was paying attention.” His father passed away last year, just before Cortés began his most ambitious project to date—the larger-than-life concrete oak trees at the Witte Museum’s H.E.B. Science Treehouse.
Although he still takes great pleasure in making his bread-and-butter creations—benches, birdhouses in the shape of San Antonio’s five missions, birdbaths that look just like a slice of tree trunk resting on gnarly branches, and big planters filled with concrete cacti (the ultimate xeriscape?)—Cortés dreams of even grander public projects: a bridge over the San Antonio River downtown, perhaps. After thirteen years in the business, he regrets only that he didn’t start sooner so he could have worked on a project with his father. But “as long as I’m working with concrete,” Cortés says, “I still feel his presence all the time.”
Taller/Studio, 1101 S. St. Mary’s, P.O. Box 831674, San Antonio 78283-1674 (210-472-3966). A birdbath costs about $500, a six-foot bench around $2,500.
IS THAT VIVALDI PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND AT HOLLY AND JOSEPH KINCANNON’S Archaic shop, accompanied by the percussive chiseling of four masons at work? The scene at this East Austin studio is from another era—or perhaps David Lynch’s imagination. Sunlight from the open doorways shoots beams through the limestone dust in the air. Mid-nineteenth-century plaster panels depicting the stations of the cross line the walls, awaiting restoration. Jesus, struggling with his burden and hounded by Romans, looks on as artisans work in limestone—Joe Eblen details a section of architectural molding, Matthew Young sculpts a fearsome visage, and D’Ellis Kincannon (Joseph’s brother) and Sue Ann Gormley repair gravestones. Deep in concentration, the four hardly look up when I enter.
I find Holly and Joseph, who are husband and wife, in the office drawing up plans for upcoming projects. The couple met (and married) at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, where they worked on its Gothic Revival stone facade. They moved to Austin almost six years ago. Holly, a fifth-generation Texan, yearned for the Hill Country, and once Joseph got a gander at the region’s wealth of carvable limestone, he was hooked. But it wasn’t an easy transition. “We went from carving gargoyles on the cathedral to cutting holes for sinks,” says the 37-year-old Joseph. “It was rough,” says Holly, who is 35. “I’m talking on a starving level.” Adds Joseph: “You know when a plain corn tortilla just tastes so good? We’d show up at the Broken Spoke with a carved stone, saying, ‘We’ll trade you for a chicken-fried steak.’”
Then the owners of Austin’s Dog and Duck Pub commissioned a fountain from the Kincannons, an eight-hundred-pound, water-spouting limestone sculpture of a bulbous-nosed dog stoically enduring a love nip on the ear from an amorous duck. After that, the carvers began to get the attention they deserved.
Commissions for the hand-chiseled creations of the Kincannons and the other carvers at Archaic now run the gamut from myth-inspired fireplaces, such as one portraying Daphne being transformed into a laurel, and a proposed ten-by-thirty-foot limestone spiral for the new Austin airport depicting the heroes and icons as well as the flora and fauna of Texas to a “beastie” fountain that gurgles outside a client’s kitchen window. The beast, surrounded by a bounty of grapes, bananas, peaches, pumpkins, and corn, looks suspiciously like its creator, Joseph Kincannon, devilishly happy to be close to so much food.
Archaic, P.O. Box 49096, Austin 78765 (512-473-8957). Prices range from around $1,000 for a limestone-and-blown-glass birdbath they’re making in collaboration with glass artist Kathleen Ash to $25,000 for the Daphne fireplace.
DON’T WEAR YOUR BLACK VELVET SUIT to the Texas Carved Stone workshop, where a snowy coating of limestone dust covers everything and everybody. Bob Ragan, who is 47, began the business outside Florence eleven years ago with his partner, Mary Condon, now 46 (see Design: “Rock Star,” TM, July 1996). He turns down the roaring stereo and leads me on a quick tour of the shop. Shelby Haggerton, a carver for five years, hammers out a set of fireplace jambs with a pneumatic chisel. George Kuhn sets tiles in a groove in a mantel while his wife, Mary, a stonecutter-in-training, shapes a piece of architectural molding. All around us are the grand works created in this relatively small shop, ready to be shipped across the country—a seven-foot kitchen hood laden with high-relief fruits and veggies; an intricate, fifteen-piece arched fireplace awaiting a wash of “antiquing”; a tabletop of delicately fossilized shellstone that is 160 million years old.
In the adjacent showroom stands more solid evidence of the exuberant craftsmanship of Ragan and his apprentices. Two little monkey-dog gargoyles grin at each other from opposing pedestals, safe from the clutches of a lion-head downspout. Fireplace mantels and jambs line the wall, some covered with delicate floral patterns, others sporting huge griffin paws at their base. There are fountains and tables and, as if I’m not already dizzy with awe, out comes a bulging photo album of the carvers’ restoration work and public projects, like the capitals they reproduced for two columns on the Hill County courthouse, in Hillsboro, and the tops they carved for columns in the Zilker Botanical Gardens, around which dance a bat, an armadillo, a horned toad, a rattlesnake, a catfish, and more. “I like doing local critters,” says Ragan.
Texas Carved Stone, 6621 Texas Highway 195, Florence 76527 (254-793-2384). A deliciously carved kitchen hood is around $3,500. A simple fireplace surround might set you back only $1,000—or you can spend about fifty times that for a 52-piece fireplace fit for Citizen Kane.
WoodFellas
FED UP WITH THE MEDIOCRE QUALITY that was the standard at the cabinet shop where he worked, Michael Colca quit his job in the late seventies and decided to strike out on his own. “I figured in five years I’d be so good, an expert . . .” Now, 23 years later, the idea of mastering his craft so rapidly seems so ludicrous that the 45-year-old Colca can’t finish the sentence without laughing. One problem back then was the lack of instructors or mentors. “Of course, I really admired the work of Sam Maloof,” he says of the California woodworker and designer who was in the vanguard of the crafts revival in the fifties. “I could read about him, but I wasn’t able to work with him.”
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