Rejuvenation Inc.
Rejuvenation Inc. Warehouse - a well preserved 1930's warehouse
A couple of weeks ago, fellow blogger Atomic Indy featured his amazing hardware purchase from Rejuvenation for his MCM restoration project. It got me thinking how fortunate us Pacific Northwesterners are to have a showroom right down the street. Then it made me think how extra special us Portlanders are for having their main distribution warehouse also right down the street. So, after I let my brain rest from all of that thinking, I e-mailed their lovely Marketing Specialist, Nicole, to see if I could get a behind the scenes peek of how they make all of their fabulous hardware and lighting fixture magic, and she agreed (without too much arm twisting) to take me on a warehouse tour…..with their MCM fixture designer Tim (his actual job title is Industrial Designer)! In addition to the tour getting scheduled, Nicole invited me to one of their lecture events appropriately titled, “Fixture Fascination: The Art of Lighting Reproduction – American lighting styles 1870-1970″. If you ever have an opportunity to attend any of the Rejuvenation events, it is well worth your time. They are highly educational, you get to meet other enthusiasts, and they have great food and wine.
I arrived on Thursday morning at the Rejuvenation warehouse armed with Saint Cupcakes (bribery tools) and my Nikon, extremely excited to get a behind the scenes peek at this amazing companies design to development process. The current warehouse is Rejuvenations 5th location since they started their business in 1977. It is located in a beautiful 1932 building that, in proper Rejuvenation fashion, has been well preserved with sustainable features. To get to the offices, I climbed the spiral staircase encased on one side by floor-to-ceiling glass block windows. At the top of the stairs I was greeted by the friendly receptionist and Nicole peeked her head out of her office, greeted me and led me to the design office to meet Tim. After a round of introductions, Tim described to me how the creative process happens for the design team. A lot of the inspiration for fixtures comes from existing vintage salvage pieces, research (internet, vintage catalogs), client suggestions, or old homes that contain original fixtures. Next, we stepped out into the 87,000 square foot warehouse that had tons of natural light pouring in from huge windows located close to the ceiling. We stopped in to a section of the warehouse where the prototypes for the new designs are created. This is where I got a sneak peek of one of the versions of a brand new mid century light fixture coming out in a couple of weeks. I was able to observe, and am amazed, at how hands on each part of the fixture creation process is. All of the parts are shipped to them separately, the finishes are carefully produced, some are sandblasted, some are exposed to different levels of oxidation to get the right color, some get buffed. There are examples of all of the different finishes hanging on the wall for each piece to be checked to ensure they are all the same color and texture so that all of your fixtures match. Once the finishes are just right, the fixtures are assembled, wired, checked to make sure they will work correctly, then carefully packed into boxes. After watching this assembly process, I was then escorted by my wonderful hosts to a slightly smaller warehouse room where they house all of the vintage salvage fixtures. There were a handful of employees restoring, preserving each piece by hand. In this section of the warehouse, there are storage shelves that are packed full of vintage lighting globes, and tons of very interesting vintage pieces. I could have spent a lot of time in that room drooling over all of the fixtures. Then, as we wrapped up the tour we stopped by the loading dock where there was pallet upon pallet of boxed up fixtures waiting to go to their clients homes.
stairs to the Rejuvenation offices - (if I worked here, I would request that my desk be located right here)
inside the warehouse - bright with natural light
shiny MCM fixtures waiting to be assembled
The history of Rejuvenation Inc. is fascinating. The original 900 sq.ft. store and concept was spawned out of the owners love of historic preservation and public demand for vintage fixtures. Historical preservation is a concept that Americans are starting to identify as important from both a historic and sustainable standpoint. Rejuvenation has been putting this concept into practice for over 32 years along with their encouragement to others to “restore” rather than “re-do”.
Rejuvenation has a 38,000 sq. ft. showroom in Portland, Oregon located at 1100 SE Grand and a 6,000 sq.ft. Seattle showroom located at 2910 First Avenue S.
Additional resources:
Arcalus Period Design is located inside of the Portland showroom. The owner, Bo Sullivan, is a historian and an independent design consultant. Bo has compiled and manages for Rejuvenation Inc., an exhaustive library of reference materials for homes from most time periods so that you can make appropriate restoration choices.
More Posts on Rejuvenation:
Janus Home – Vintage Modern Furniture
Janus Home Showroom
I started following @Janus_Home on twitter a little while ago and the tweets were pretty entertaining; good taste in music, and there were posts with links to fun, vintage Craigslist items that they weren’t pursuing but (according to them) somebody should. The other day a tweet flew by that Janus Home had staged a primo mid century modern home on Fremont designed by Birkmeier. I grabbed my keys and headed over to the house, which has an amazing view, floor to ceiling windows, and the owners have left most of the original hardware and finishes. The staging wasn’t quite finished but what they had set up was perfect for the house, or for an Atomic Crash Party…
After I had left this mid century marvel, I realized that I had never actually been to the Janus Home showroom so I popped on over to see what they have on hand. The 4,000 sq. ft. showroom is full of mid century vintage furniture that is in great condition. Janus Home either obtains their pieces in great condition or they refurbish and reupholster furniture that is not in great condition. You can view their inventory on the Janus Home website and choose pieces prior to the refinishing process, and in some cases, choose your finish or fabric so that it is exactly what you want. While I was there, I had the pleasure of meeting the owner, Jeremy, who is the twitter admin and also writes their blog that is very educational.
So, if you are in need/want of some incredible vintage modern furniture, stop by the showroom or visit the Janus Home website (they will happily ship anything, anywhere!).
Located at:
1324 SE Grand Ave
Portland Oregon 97214
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gordon House – Silverton, Oregon
Frank Lloyd Wright Gordon House - Silverton, Oregon
living room
model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Gordon House
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to take a little field trip and head out to Silverton to visit the only Frank Lloyd Wright designed home in Oregon. The Gordon’s commissioned Wright to design the home in 1957 but the cost came out to be around $56k to build, which did not fit the Gordon’s budget at the time. The Gordon’s and Wright made some changes and were able to scale the cost down to approximately $25k before it was built and completed in 1964. The Gordon house was originally built on the banks of the Willamette in Charbonneau where the floor to ceiling glass had a front row view of the Willamette at one side and Mt. Hood on the other side. In 2001, after Mrs. Gordon had passed away and the house had been sitting for a few years, the new owners of the property requested a demolition permit so that they could build their new home. After the outrage dust had settled, preservationists were able to move the house to it’s new home in the Oregon Garden in Silverton.
You enter the home through what feels like a back door off of the carport. The entry way into the home has a very low ceiling that gives way to the main living space that has 12 ft. ceilings with floor to ceiling glass doors and windows, creating a very dramatic entrance. The bedrooms were rather small and all of the smaller windows had the hand cut window frets on them (the tour guide let us know that the hand cutouts were one of the more expensive items in the house). It is an amazing home, I could stare at and trace the flow of the homes woodwork and design all day long. It is incredible that the same materials used on the interior are the same as on the exterior, and the wooden beams seem to seamlessly go through the walls.
The Gordon house is available for tours when it is not being used for private events (great place for a wedding).
Another Organic Architect in Oregon:
Located at:
879 Main Street
Silverton Oregon 97381
Architect Feature: John Yeon
Watzek house by John Yeon built in 1936 - Portland, OR
John Yeon is credited with being one the the founders of the Northwest Regional Architectural style. One of his most popular projects, the Watzek house, was widely published and admired in both Europe and the US. It was deemed by House Beautiful magazines 1946 issue as “one of the great houses of America”. Some of the most notable features of a Yeon residential design is his use of unique features such as: double glazed windows, hidden cabinets, window ventilation systems (believed to be invented by Yeon) where the window would not open but either above or below it there were vents to allow the structure to breath so that you would not clutter your landscape view with a screen. The concept of his design was to incorporate the structure into its surrounding landscape, working with natures lines. Yeon had virtually no formal training as an architect and never received his architect license but was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects and he was awarded Lewis and Clark’s Aubrey Watzek award in 1980.
Yeon was one of the early conservationists, fighting to save historic buildings and becoming a lobbyist for the preservation of the Columbia River Gorge. In 1964, he persuaded the head of the U.S Bureau of Roads that the I-84 freeway should follow more closely the curves of the natural landscape rather than cut through it. When he was 17, Yeon borrowed money against a life insurance policy to purchase a piece of property called Chapman Point which was (allegedly) proposed as a site for a dance hall. Yeon never built on this coastal piece of land, and it is now one of the most photographed sites along the Oregon Coast.
UPDATE: The below content is from the comments (for clarification) left by Richard Louis Brown Founder of the John Yeon Center for Architectural Studies who also donated the Watzek House to University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts. Thank you.
“Yeon was office boy in the firm of Herman Brookman at age 14 and 15. Later, at age 26, he had a very brief (and uncomfortable) stint of about three months in the A. E. Doyle office during the production of working drawings for the Watzek House, which he had designed on his own. (A more extensive history is included in Yeon’s interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 1982-83, and in Meredith Clausen’s book on Pietro Belluschi, MIT Press, 1994.) Timberline Lodge was not designed by the A. E. Doyle office, nor did Yeon have anything to do with the lodge as it was built. On his own, he proposed a lodge for Timberline and built a model (which still exists) but it was in a Modernist style and sited differently from the lodge as built. He did have a minor role in the design of the lobby of Doyle’s Public Service building in downtown Portland, but did not work on other “prestigious projects” of the Doyle office, and the implication that his career developed under Belluschi is erroneous. He was, for virtually his entire design career, completely independent.
From an early age, Yeon was a tireless advocate for parks and city planning, historic preservation, and landscape preservation–but he was never a professional lobbyist. He was 21 when he purchased Chapman Point. It is a stretch to say that the point was going to be the site of a dance hall, although the property was for sale, and a dance hall had been mentioned as a possibility. At the time, he hoped that the state parks would eventually be able to buy the point and add it to Ecola State Park, but he ended up protecting it for the rest of his life. After his death, in 1994, his coastal property was sold, with the stipulation that the point would be added to the park.”
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