These old fixtures renew current homes in style

WHAT’S OLD BECOMES NEW: New England Demolition and Salvage owner Harry James has about 500 clawfoot tubs, and thousands of other items, in his New Bedford warehouse. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
WHAT’S OLD BECOMES NEW: New England Demolition and Salvage owner Harry James has about 500 clawfoot tubs, and thousands of other items, in his New Bedford warehouse. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

Some house hunters will search far and wide for certain vintage details or fall head over heels for a property with the pristine clawfoot tub or stained-glass window they’ve always dreamed of.
But fixing up a rundown Victorian isn’t the only way to get vintage charm in your home as long as you’re not bothered if your original details were originally somewhere else.
At his New Bedford warehouse, New England Demolition and Salvage owner Harry James presides over about 500 old clawfoot tubs, and thousands more other items, in the largest dealership of vintage furnishings in the region.
“The older the better,” James said about his approach to salvage. “I don’t consider anything an antique.”
Row upon row of sinks, doors, windows, fireplace mantels, doorknobs, radiators, columns and ironwork fill the warehouse like a graveyard for departed homes.
With new home construction still lagging in most of New England and remodeling taking a larger share of residential building projects, demand for vintage and salvaged materials remains strong.
New England Demolition and Salvage moved to the 80,000-square-foot former Berkshire Hathaway mill from Wareham, Mass., in 2007, not long before the real estate market nosedived.
But the company survived the recession while competitors fell away. The nearest is now in Boston, and now James said New England Demolition is growing again. To supplement sales for home improvement projects, the business recently opened a theatrical prop-rental operation serving movie sets in the region.
“Since the economy has gotten better, people are remodeling again,” James said. “Every year we do better.”
While salvaged hardware grows in popularity and remains much less expensive to procure than equivalent new items, architects say using vintage materials becomes difficult on larger projects. “It is something we look into quite frequently, but it is difficult, because you not only have to find the right product, but you have to time it right,” said Christine West, principal at Kite Architects in Providence.
“Say you are designing a large project that will need flooring, but it will be six months at least until you install it,” West said. “If you are going to use salvage, you will need to reserve it and stockpile it. But the storage issue can be huge.”
For that reason, smaller original touches like doors and bathtubs are easier and more common, West said, and many of the most successful projects reuse materials found within the property being renovated instead of from the outside.
“We have better luck reusing things within the existing location,” West said. “It really depends on what you find. Doors are more easily done, radiators and trim – Victorian mantels and lighting fixtures. The opportunity will prevent itself.”
West said one of the most exciting vintage remodeling projects she had been a part of involved a 17th-century window transom, the horizontal piece above a window or door, with hand-blown glass.
West said Providence used to have a few places that sold salvage, but they have gone out of business, leaving the nearest options in New Bedford or northeastern Connecticut.
The Providence Revolving Fund, a nonprofit that finances urban historic renovation projects, has an architectural-salvage operation, but does not advertise it, instead using it for its own projects and others in its immediate neighborhood on the city’s West Side. In Boston’s South End, Restoration Resources caters to the high-end remodeling market in a 7,000-square-foot warehouse featuring antique statues, woodwork and artifacts from churches and grand houses.
Back in New Bedford, James said despite the demand for vintage pieces and the number of old homes that have been lost to the foreclosure crisis, there is no shortage of old houses with valuable pieces in New England.
He opened the business in 1998 after moving east from California, where old houses were much harder to come by. New Bedford, where foreclosures and demolitions have been common in recent years, is a good source of material.
In a typical case, James and others in the salvage market will learn of a building scheduled for demolition and bid on the whole thing. Whoever makes the highest bid gets to pull anything out of it they can.
James said items from the Victorian era are probably the most popular because of their decorative details, but he has pieces going back to the late 1600s.
Most of the items New England Demolition sells aren’t made in the same way or style anymore and new massed-produced equivalents are usually more expensive.
James said the best part of his job is the moment he first walks through a house being offered up or salvage and starts spotting old neglected treasures.
It happened this month with a property in Newport that had once been a 19th-century church before a New Jersey man had converted it into a house.
“I started taking stuff out and I was standing in front of a stained glass window like I was in church,” James said. •

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