Saving Grace

Preservation charity in North Carolina salvages and resells architectural gems

Walking into the showroom of Architectural Salvage of Greensboro can feel a little bit like walking

into a museum — or maybe a Home Depot for historic houses.

Customers wander among vintage claw-foot bath tubs, beautiful old columns from front porches, shelves of glass doorknobs from the turn of the century, and buckets of old hinges.

Graceful chandeliers from the 1920s hang from the ceiling, while pressed-metal ceilings and windows with period glass beckon to do-it-yourselfers.

“It really is an eclectic mix of things,” says Benjamin Briggs, executive director of Preservation Greensboro Incorporated, the charity that started the retail store. “People are always just fascinated to poke around and look at things.”

Disturbed by the number of historic buildings that were being torn down in the city and the likelihood that all the architectural details were being lost to the landfill, several members of the North Carolina preservation organization started the business in the mid 1990s.

Volunteers go into buildings that are about to be demolished and carefully remove items that could be reused elsewhere, often saving elaborate wooden mantels, solid wooden doors, and other materials.

They then clean the pieces, sometimes scraping them down and removing nails, to get them ready for sale in the showroom. Volunteers are rewarded for their efforts with credit toward the purchase of the recycled items.

The money the store earns goes to a grant program for local residents who are restoring historic homes in the city.

While the store never lost money for the preservation group — in part because the city provided free showroom space early on — getting the business to the point where it was turning a profit took some time.

But in the past three years, Preservation Greensboro has handed out $20,000 to $30,000 in grants, paid entirely from the proceeds of the business.

Grants Awarded

Most of Architectural Salvage’s customers are local residents who are restoring old homes.

“Sometimes people scratch their head,” says Mr. Briggs. “They have a floor that has some damage and they need to find that old, thick heart-pine flooring that you can’t buy at Lowe’s and Home Depot.”

At Architectural Salvage, they can find the thickness and vintage of flooring that they need. “It blends in perfectly,” he says.

In the grant program supported by the business, the organization tries to make awards that will have a strong impact on a home’s exterior or pay for details that a homeowner would probably leave out because of cost.

If someone were rebuilding a front porch whose original design called for elaborate woodwork, but the cost of a faithful reconstruction was too steep for the homeowner, that would be an ideal opportunity for the grant program, says Mr. Briggs.

“We really prefer to make grants to projects that are sort of the icing on the cake,” he says.

‘You Just Can’t Save Everything’

Seeing tangible pieces of Greensboro’s history find new homes through the business and ensuring that the proceeds go toward restoration projects is rewarding, says Mr. Briggs.

One of the volunteers who helps salvage items for the store was able to turn an old workbench from a local manufacturing plant into an island for the kitchen of her 1920s home.

“It had all the depressions where generations of workers had made things on this workbench,” he says. “But it looks so good in her kitchen. The height was perfect, the color, the tone, the patina was perfect.”

But at the same time, Architectural Salvage’s work can be bittersweet.

“I would much rather we not have all these items if we were able to save the buildings, but the reality is that you just can’t save everything,” says Mr. Briggs.

In May, after a long, bruising battle, Gray House, which had been built before the Civil War, was torn down to make way for new development. Mr. Briggs says the house was beloved by city residents, and from the window in his office, he can see the four-story condominium building going up in its place.

But before the old building came down, the developer donated its contents.

Says Mr. Briggs: “Parts of that house, at least, live on.”