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.
MY FATHER HAS TWO WALNUT END TABLES THAT WERE made in the thirties by his uncle Clint, who harvested the lumber from the Kentucky woods where he lived. He was a handy fellow who repaired stills and could play two harmonicas at once, using his mouth and nose. Of all my parents’ possessions, it’s these two tables, beautifully crafted and full of the spirit of their maker, that I most look forward to inheriting someday. They’re not the oldest or the most valuable things in the house, but I’ve always thought of them as heirlooms.
These little tables set me to wondering: What furnishings made today would rise to the top of the overwhelming sea of plastic molding, mass-produced ironwork, and screwed-and-glued Santa Fe dining suites to become tomorrow’s heirlooms? Where is the hand-forged, laboriously chiseled, dovetailed construction that was once the standard? Could it be that they just don’t make ’em like that anymore?
Happily, the answer is no. There are still people out there who are driven by the desire to make things more tangible than a stock-market killing—and make them to last. I used up my lifetime allotment of “wow’s” researching this article, reduced to monosyllabic outbursts not only by the artisans’ flawless workmanship and the elegance of their designs but, most of all, by their tenacity and perseverance in mastering their crafts. Most of the artisans I met came of age during the crafts renaissance of the sixties and seventies. Then, some back-to-earthers made sand candles or tie-dyed T-shirts or macramé plant hangers, inconsequential crafts with a limited future; these folks probably went on to become accountants and administrators. Others, however, took to more substantial arts—blacksmithing, stone carving, woodworking—and found themselves on a decades-long path up a steep learning curve with few instructors in sight.
If you want an everlasting rocker or a museum-quality garden gate, these craftspeople are worth searching out. Visit several artisans and frankly discuss prices, materials, and completion schedules. (The best of them are very busy; this summer is not too early to enlist one of Santa’s most talented elves to make that ultimate Christmas gift. And if you’re building a new house and want fine craftsmen involved in the construction—a fireplace, a stair rail, a fountain—bring them in during the design stage, not at the tail end.)
When you meet with an artisan, have a definite idea of what you want in terms of general style and dimensions. Feel free to clip pictures from magazines or sketch what you’re after to ensure that both of you are speaking the same visual language, but don’t discount his or her creativity or hard-won design expertise. “People should treat the craftsman as a designer and artist,” says metalsmith Joe Pehoski. “If someone hands me a picture and asks, ‘How much will it take to make this?’—at that point I have ceased to be a craftsman, in the true sense of the word, and I have become a fabricator.”
Don’t try to cut costs by asking an artisan not to make it quite so good, unless you’d like a heavy tool flung your way. And while most woodworkers are happy to create a sentimental piece of furniture from, say, that old pecan tree that blew over at your family ranch, don’t plan on saving any money by going this route; milling and transportation can more than equal the cost of wood from a lumberyard.
The profiles that follow are a mere sampling of the hundreds of artisans working across the state, a taste to whet your appetite for fine craftsmanship. In the interest of my own sanity, I have confined the list to folks who specialize in functional home or garden furnishings made of metal, stone, or wood. Though there is no shortage of fine designers who have their creations made for them, I focused on those artisans who are out in the shop or studio nearly every day, going mano a mano with red-hot steel, eight-ton chunks of limestone, and whirling saw blades. And they all had to meet one overriding criterion: Their craftsmanship had to leave me open-mouthed and drooling.
Because these craftspeople create mostly one-of-a-kind furnishings, they were understandably reticent about quoting dollar amounts, but the prices listed should give you an idea of what to expect. Of course, a custom-made cherry dining table your kids’ kids’ kids will gather around should be considered an investment, one that will appreciate—and be appreciated—for generations. Surprisingly, these unique creations, made by characters as multitalented as my father’s uncle Clint, often cost little more than the flimsy imitations cranked out in foreign sweatshops by people whose singular musical abilities we may never know.
Men of Steel
IF YOU WANT TO GET A GOOD IDEA of the range of James Cinquemani’s metallic talents, stand in front of the north entrance to Goldsmith Hall at the University of Texas at Austin and try to determine which of the two large lanterns flanking the door is the reproduction Cinquemani made to replace its 65-year-old partner that was lost when the building was enlarged during the eighties. But his skills aren’t limited to making copies; on the south side of the building are stately new light fixtures he designed and crafted to echo architectural details on the new construction.
A visit to the fifty-year-old Cinquemani’s studio-home in a light-industrial area of Dallas provides further evidence of his mastery of metals. The entrance is guarded by one of his “active” gates, its steel rods layered and staggered in such a way that the pattern shifts as you walk past. Inside his office, a mushroomlike table lamp with a celestial pattern of holes drilled into the domed copper shade is perched on its pointed steel tiptoes. (Its cousins live in the greenroom at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas.) An armchair Cinquemani created from four large disks of galvanized steel—discarded by-products from a metal-fabricating company down the road—seems to float on its thin legs and has just enough spring for its occupant (me) to comfort herself with gentle rocking. Turn on the light inside the base of a game table and the shape of a star is projected onto its frosted-glass top.
Cinquemani’s father was a tool and die maker in Dallas. “As I grew up, I would work in his machine shop, run parts for him,” he says, “but I was always interested in making things—unusual things—so at the end of the day, I’d gather up all the scrap and start making sculptures out of them.” He perfected his techniques over the years, first working with University of Dallas art professor Heri Bartscht—whose varied projects exposed him to wood carving, bronze casting, plasterwork, copper hammering, and more—and then by working in a fabricating shop where he made architectural metal fixtures from other people’s designs.
He now boasts fourteen or fifteen design patents for objects like star-shaped bronze flagstaff holders and a sleek silver letter opener that Neiman Marcus featured in its 1985 Christmas catalog. He has designed and made cast-bronze “bamboo” rose arbors for the Dallas Arboretum, door pulls bearing the handprints of husband and wife, and a bed with a wisteria vine creeping up one post, as well as the copper finials on the turrets of the Old Red Courthouse in Dallas and twisted-steel stair rails that, he says, look exactly like “a tree branch that you just kind of picked up and pruned off.”
Metals Craftsman, 2412 Hardwick, Dallas 75208 (214-742-2569). Lamps start at around $1,200, a small table is about $3,500, and entrance gates range from $10,000 (simple) to $50,000 (spectacular).
METALSMITH JOE PEHOSKI SAYS HE HAS “one foot in the fourteenth century and one foot in the twenty-first century,” a description that seems apt as he leads me past the toasty forge and blazing torches in his shop outside Salado and up the stairs to his office, where we plop down in front of a big-screen computer. Pehoski bought the computer several years ago—primarily for its spell-checking abilities—but soon realized that it could save him from having to redraft entire drawings to make the slightest change. “My stomach was always in my throat because the thickness of a hand-drawn line determined whether something would fit or not,” he says. Although Pehoski, who is fifty, still designs the “old way,” with pen and paper, he now scans his drawings into the computer, so that minor adjustments are a snap. He credits the machine with helping him grow as a metalsmith. “It freed up my thinking,” he says. “Without it, I would probably be doing less—and more of the same thing.”
After almost thirty years of bending steel to his will, Pehoski’s projects range from historically accurate hardware for the Elissa, the restored 1877 bark at Galveston’s Texas Seaport Museum, to sweeping staircases in the houses of Hollywood moguls and all the metalwork for a humongous mansion whose whereabouts he won’t disclose—everything from drawer pulls to fifteen-foot-tall chandeliers. He collaborates with metalsmith Wendel Broussard (from, no kidding, Smithville) when a project calls for exquisite repoussé work, the process of creating relief patterns on, say, a metal leaf or flower by hammering on the reverse side. (This perfunctory definition doesn’t do Broussard’s dreamy renderings justice: “He’s the best repoussé artist in the country,” says Pehoski.)
We tour the shop: Pehoski’s wife, Lynda, is “aging” pieces of drapery hardware using a formula of paints, stains, and waxes that gives the metal what he calls a “pedigree feel.” His fabricator, Jason Stout, works on a stair railing that curls to the ceiling of the warehouse. Nanette Whitten is welding little horns to the tops of a set of lanterns. As Pehoski points out other works in progress—an enormous kitchen-range hood, curlicued garden gates—it is obvious that despite his newfound respect for computing, his heart (and his permanently blackened palms) is down here with the fire and the coal.
Pehoski Metalsmiths, P.O. Box 84, Stinnette Mill Road, Salado 76571 (254-947-5740). Prices range from $80 for a candlestick and $3,800 for a simple gate to $175,000 for a custom curved stair railing.
My Library
