Restored in Maine
Age: 60
Business: Restoration Resources
Location: Alna
For Les Fossel, restoring old houses isn't about preserving the past. The way he sees it, returning a 1750s Cape to its original glory is about preserving the future. "If you think about it, buildings are the visual representation of your community," he says.
It's the old and still-standing farmhouses, Capes and saltboxes that give Maine much of its pastoral reputation. They're what separates parts of Maine from the cookie-cutter architecture and blocky suburban planning that's taken root in so many New England towns. "What's interesting about Maine is that we have the originals," says Fossel. "We have the real things, and that's what attracts people from the outside."
The houses most certainly attracted Fossel, who relocated from Connecticut to Alna, a Lincoln County town just a few miles inland from Wiscasset and Damariscotta, 26 years ago. He says Alna was a "safe place," a refuge from the sprawling suburbia he saw in southern New England. And it was a good place to continue his nascent contracting business, now known as Restoration Resources (www.oldhouserestoration.com), which specializes in 18th and 19th century houses. But that niche hasn't slowed down business. Last year, Fossel and his 11 employees did more than $1.2 million of work.
In most years, Fossel says, Restoration Resources books around 20 jobs. Some years have been better than others. In 2004, the company had around $760,000 in revenues, down from $1.4 million two years earlier. This year is looking like a good year; the company already has a backlog of business worth more than $900,000.
This year's jobs range from a $500,000 restoration project near Boothbay Harbor to a $500 job installing a sump pump for a customer in Alna. The pump job is a prime example of Fossel's holistic approach to old houses. "If you don't want your building to rot, keep it dry," he says. "Is that restoration? No, it's conservation and preservation."
But Fossel has had to put limits on the kinds of jobs Restoration Resources takes. Most are within an hour's drive from Alna, for reasons Fossel says are both economic and pragmatic.
Because Fossel makes a point to guarantee his work — he likens it to "the L.L. Bean approach" — he wants to make sure a crew can easily and quickly attend to any problems at a former job site. "If you're going to be in this business, you're going to be in this business permanently," he says. "We stand behind our stuff." At the same time, it doesn't make financial sense to have crews driving all over Maine for small fixes. "Three hours of driving just to take a hand plane to a door to make it fit right? You'll go broke," Fossel says.
Fiscal discipline was something Fossel, 60, learned early. Growing up in the suburbs outside New York City, Fossel's mother — a "child of the depression," he says — urged her five sons to get their college degrees and find stable professions. Fossel did just that, earning a degree in sociology and anthropology from Lake Forest College, near Chicago, and landing a job at an insurance company. "But what I really wanted to do was restore old buildings," he says. "It was what I had a passion for. It was what I enjoyed."
He started with a house in Canterbury, Conn., built in the mid-1700s, that for generations served as a parsonage. Fossel's work began in the mid 1970s, a time of sky-high inflation that meant interest rates of 30% on the loans Fossel took out to pay for the renovations. "I came out not bankrupt, but that's all I can say," he says. "The bad news was I almost lost my shirt. But the good news was it got me into the business I'm in today."
And as Fossel continued to renovate old buildings, he'd attract passer-by who peppered him with requests to replace a rotting sill or restore windows at a historic house. In the beginning, Fossel wasn't interested. But then a funny thing happened — he'd turn down the work, saying he was too busy, but the response would be, "We'll wait."
Fossel moved to Alna in the early 1980s after researching areas of New England he thought he might want to live, looking for a place with plenty of work where he could hang his toolbelt. As a businessman with a specialty that serves as both vocation and passion, Fossel feels comfortable in Maine, a place he describes as full of people making a living doing what they enjoy.
Still, chasing a passion and turning that passion into a money-making venture are two wildly different things — just ask any Mainers whose ventures are, at heart, niche businesses, from a Washington County fly-rod repair shop to a North Woods dog-sled operation. It's a lesson Fossel learned, and one that has helped shape his business philosophy. "If you love something, it's easy not to value your talents," he says. "But unless you value your talents, you go broke." Fossel says he's struck a good balance in what he charges for each job, though he's reluctant to give an average cost since the jobs vary so widely.
Fossel says there's a certain peace of mind that comes with restoration projects. A restoration expert, he says, will often save the customer money with a few sage bits of advice, from ways to trim labor costs to whether walls of horse-hair plaster can be patched instead of replaced. "It's how little you can do to solve the problem, not how much," he says. "And that's something that applies to all businesses."
Age: 57
Business: Art restoration, original paintings
Location: Thomaston
BY CHRIS CHURCHILL
Blaikie Hines wasn't alone in his studio. In one part of the room sat a lovely young blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful, wearing her prettiest dress, a bouquet in hand. Just a few feet away sat the man who invented the pacemaker.
Neither the blonde nor the inventor were looking their best on this recent day, however, and that's what brought them to Thomaston. Hines would give the pair a makeover, though his touch would be gentle. "I'm trying to protect the integrity of the piece," he says.
Hines, 57, specializes in restoring oil paintings, at least when he's not painting his own pieces, which are handled by major auction houses, or writing books on Civil War history. Ask him how he charges for his work, or how long it takes him to restore a piece, and he'll say the question is unanswerable. That's because the formula for each is a complex stew of a painting's value and age mixed with the owner's desires and the difficulty of the restoration job. "It's like a surgeon doing an operation — you don't care how long it takes," Hines says. "I'm not paid for the time it took. I'm paid for the results."
The results he gets are well-known in the art world, but three decades ago, when he was a recent Ohio State University graduate, Hines hadn't even picked up a brush. He wasn't interested in art. He was penniless. He struggled with alcohol and drugs. The path of his life could fill a novel, but here, at least, are the highlights: Five years spent drifting in London, where he discovered the joys of the Tate Museum and the magnificence of art; a transcendent experience that changed his life; and a low-level job at a Connecticut art gallery that introduced him to folks who restored art. "They had a life that was so attractive to me, because it was free," Hines says of the restoration experts. "They would come in and talk, and they seemed to have all the time in the world."
While he was learning the art-restoration trade in Connecticut, Hines had a life-altering experience. As Hines tells the story, he was driving drunk and was forced to pull over when his heart began racing. Stopped at the side of the road, Hines thought he was about to die. Then, he says, God spoke to him. Hines says the moment gave his life religious purpose; he stopped drinking and using drugs, and became a devout Christian. He's a deacon in his family's church.
Eventually Hines entered the art-restoration field, building a reputation in Connecticut for quality work. Hines, with his wife and daughter, moved to Maine in 1989, but he still travels to Darien, Conn., near New York City, once a month to retrieve and return paintings. Art gallery owners around Darien refer potential clients to Hines; they put him in touch with the nursing-home-bound woman who wanted the painting of the blonde girl, one of her ancestors, restored before she gave it to her daughter, and with hospital administrators who wanted to enliven their facility by hanging a portrait of the inventor, Wilson Greatbatch, in a busy hallway.
Hines has a full beard and longish white hair that together make him look a little like Ernest Hemingway. He's a passionate man, a fast talker with hands that are always in motion. He is a nearly obsessive worker. Most mornings, he arrives at his studio, the top floor of a restored barn attached to his home, at 5:30 and stays for 12 hours. He'll get to know a painting before taking his brush to it. "I'll pass by that every day," he says, gesturing toward the painting of the girl, "and I'll say, 'How are you going to do that, Blaikie?' And then tomorrow I'll look at it, then the next day. And then one day I'll pick up a brush and I'll do it, and I'll have it all worked out in my head."
The girl was painted in 1868. When approaching an older painting, Hines tries to determine how the artist worked and viewed the world. "How did they paint the sky in the 19th century?" he says. "I'm very interested in that. I get into the head of the artist."
The job, he says, is part art and part science. He's a chemist when he mixes paint, trying to create a color that matches that in the painting. And he's an artist when he picks up a brush and, with a steady hand, adds color and life to a faded or damaged painting.
When he describes his work and life — and his recently achieved financial security, a combination of his lucrative restoration work and the prices fetched by his own paintings — Hines sounds as though he can hardly believe his luck. "This is what I've always wanted," he says. "I'm living the dream."
Age: 47
Business: American Honeycomb Radiator Manufacturing
Location: Bowdoin
BY WHIT RICHARDSON
On a recent morning, Charles Niles, a tall, 47-year-old with close-cropped reddish hair, stands in his Bowdoin workshop before a disassembled radiator from a 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540K. The hunk of metal that is the radiator core may not look like much to a layperson's eye, but to Niles the 540K's radiator takes on mythic proportions.
"This is the most difficult radiator in the world to work on," Niles says, gesturing to the antique engine-cooling apparatus. The core, which resembles a large metal honeycomb, consists of 11,000 metal tubes, which, if placed end to end, would stretch nearly a mile. (A fully restored 540K could fetch at least a $5 million starting bid at auction, Niles says.) Nearby sits a radiator, also disassembled, from a 1920s Rolls Royce Ghost. Other radiators from long ago rest scattered around the workshop, part of a year-and-a-half's backlog of work.
The story of Niles' path to this corner of automotive arcana — the restoration of vintage radiators — is one of survival rather than family tradition. In the mid-1970s, when he was 16, Niles began working in his future father-in-law's radiator shop, Topsham Radiator. By the time he bought the business in 1986, he realized the old-fashioned radiator shop was doomed. "I realized if I wanted to stay in this business I'd have to find something where I'm not competing with Carquest, VIP or NAPA," Niles says.
The transition, however, from working on contemporary radiators to specimens from pre-1940s automobiles wasn't as simple as it sounds. Niles had no do-it-yourself books on restoring antique radiators, no mentors to learn from and no correspondence courses to take. So Niles, who began welding manhole covers with his father when he was eight, began teaching himself. He started by working on radiators from cars built in the 1960s. As he became proficient in that era's radiators, word spread among automobile enthusiasts in the area, and, gradually, older radiators began showing up in his shop. As Niles' expertise grew, so did his reputation. Today, Niles says, 90% of his work comes from outside Maine, including clients from overseas. (He changed his business' name to American Honeycomb Radiator Manufacturing in 2005 after acquiring a radiator repair shop in New Jersey of the same name.) Ninety percent of his business comes from word of mouth, Niles says. If he suddenly scrapped his website, www.antiqueradiators.com, he says, it wouldn't affect his business.
Niles charges $65 an hour for his services. In the past, he's spent as many as 360 hours on a single radiator. It's that time-consuming work, he says, along with the complexities involved, that make vintage radiators the realm of specialists, though Niles says he isn't aware of anyone with the same specialty.
To successfully work in such a niche, the work must be self-rewarding, Niles says. For him, working with some of the most beautiful cars in the world is reward enough. And, he says, he appreciates the history in his hands when he's working on, say, a 1928 Stutz Black Hawk Speedster. "I'm seeing, feeling, touching something that's almost a hundred years old," Niles says. "It's a little bit like interactive history."
Looking ahead, Niles realizes that a piece of that history may be lost if he fails to pass on the skills and knowledge he has gained during his career. He has two daughters, and says if either of them brings home a beau with enough interest in the business, he might take the young man under his wing and teach him the trade. "If not," Niles says, "then there'll come a point in time where I'll find an apprentice. Because I understand that when I'm all done, if I don't pass it on, it's done. And I'd like that not to happen."
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