AT HOME : Taking It From the Streets

“WE BOUGHT AN OLD street,” Joe Nolan says, describing some of the stone samples at Coast Flagstone in West Los Angeles. With all the hot antique-furniture, -linen and -hats trade, why not antique paving? It’s an unusual byproduct of the city’s explosive development trend; new construction, involving digging up early foundations, occasionally exposes old cobblestone driveways and alleys underneath modern asphalt.

Coast has acquired more than 10,000 square feet of such 19th-Century cobblestones (about $9 a square foot), mined from the Sierra and probably installed in the early 1900s. They come from a section of early downtown near Olympic and Alameda where they were found buried 18 inches deep, with the wear from the wheels of horse-drawn carriages etched in the granite.

If you prefer naturally aged materials, Coast has some 60,000 feet of 18th-Century cobblestones from Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia. These Revolutionary War-era stones crossed the Atlantic as ballast on European cargo ships. And, if all the new bricks made to look old in 1990s driveways and wall facades leave you cold, Coast stocks a supply of genuinely old bricks--most of which are circa the 1920s and ‘30s--from our rapidly dismantling architectural heritage.

Bourget Brothers/Coast Flagstone, 2213 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles; (213) 479-7538.