A Guide to the Best of Southern California : HANDMADE : This Old House

THERE’S NO APPLE PIE cooling on kitchen-window ledges, no chickens clucking on the front steps of Michael Ridel’s interpretations of Early American homes and structures, but they’re easily imagined. With his pieces, Ridel gently rolls back into focus memories of old New England farmhouses and their classic red barns.

Ridel works in the spirit of folk art (“Folk art is not pretentious. It just is,” he says). Using weathered wood he has salvaged and iron hardware rusted with salt and muriatic acid, he captures the essence of a Colonial saltbox, a classic rural schoolhouse, a New England Cape Cod. All the pieces are signed and dated, and no two are exactly alike. A perfect size to sit on a coffee table or mantel, they range in size from 12 to 17 inches tall and in price from $450 for a Shaker outbuilding to $950 for an Americana barn with a half-stone foundation.

“You can’t make wood old,” Ridel explains. “It has a beauty of its own. Whenever I see a Dumpster, I stop and look. Junk is my treasure.”

Michael Ridel, The Wood Shed, by appointment only; (213) 476-6883.