Creating Art for Everyday : Decor: Tijuana <i> artesanos </i> and <i> artistas </i> use their hands, talent to make things of beauty that fit into the home.

That is no ordinary garage door leaning against the wall in a downtown store. And that was no carpenter who built it. And built is not the word.

This door is more like a huge artistic panel that would enhance the wall of an elegant home in an exclusive neighborhood. It was created, not built, and will sell for $900. It was designed with care and carved with art, and the purchaser is going to receive more than just a seal of pine for the garage.

The door is a product of Antonio Galvan, a Tijuana artist, sculptor mainly, who specializes in wood carvings. He gave this door birds and a sunburst, enlivened with mermaids and fish.

“He’ll make a crucifix for you too,” store owner Jesus Perez Sanchez said. “French or Italian. Maybe you’d rather have Neptune.” And Galvan, a Guanajuato native Perez induced to move to the border street. There, owner David Lugo and his accountant-business partner, JoAnne Hutsel, San Diego natives who are incorrigible Mexicophiles, feel like pioneers. Los Rios, like Tolan, is providing what could become tomorrow’s antiques. Still, trends are followed.

“All the furniture used to be 90% Southwest,” Lugo said. “Now, it’s only 10% Southwest. Now, it’s Egyptian, Mexican and New Mexican. And some Mexican colonial, real rustic.”

Lugo, a Mexico resident for 35 years, hopes it soon will become “cowboy.” He has designed what he calls cowboy hutches. They are large, vertical wooden cabinets suitable for books, clothes, stereo, television or liquor storage, or a combination of those. Carvings on the facades include cowboy hats, boots, horses and stars.

“It’s new,” Lugo said. “It’s catching on.” Lugo does a lot of the designing for Los Rios. He is especially fond of a chair with a sunburst on the back and of a table shaped like an elongated tiger, evocative of the well-known chacmool , a rain divinity of the Maya and Toltec. Both are hand-carved and hand-painted and are popular with patrons (the former sells for $225, the latter for $800). The “tiger table” was so popular, Hutsel said, that she saw a copy in a very fancy store in Beverly Hills.

More familiar are tables and chairs and desks, some in the simple Southwest style, others right off the old hacienda, some carved elegantly or painted artistically. One of the fanciest desks Los Rios has produced was exquisitely hand-carved in pine recently by Alvaro Rosales, an artisan newly arrived from Mexico City.

Lugo’s painter is usually Felipe Chaboya of Tijuana, a ceramist and fine artist who paints at home in oils and acrylics but who also, for eight years on the job for Lugo, has provided the special finishes of paint or stain that much of the furniture requires. Sometimes he draws designs on wood for the carver.

Chaboya and 50-plus other workers operate out of the immense Los Rios warehouse near a dairy in northern Rosarito. They create the Los Rios designs there, but the warehouse is also a reception point for ready-mades, such as tables and mirror frames--large wooden ovals and circles--purchased in the state of Michoacan and shipped to Rosarito.

Lugo spends a lot of time in the Mexican interior, assiduously scouting Michoacan and Oaxaca, Puebla and Jalisco and other sites, hunting for unusual pieces of furniture as well as for fine examples of Mexican folk art, the collecting of which led him into business at Rosarito nine years ago.

“I love traveling in Mexico,” he said. “The artisans are fantastic. What’s sad is to find one and go back a year later and he’s in the United States picking tomatoes or washing cars, because he can make more money.”

Lugo sometimes hires a worker--artist, artisan or carpenter--from the interior, other times from Rosarito or Tijuana. He says he pays well, in order to keep them, which means $100 to $500 a week for a five-day week, except for the sanders, whom he pays $80 a week. (The legal minimum wage in Tijuana is about $4 a day for a six-day week.) But many often leave for similar jobs in the United States.

“It’s hard to keep good help,” he said. “But I’ve had workers leave here for the States and then return here. They make more money in the States, but the cost of living is higher, and the cultural differences often bother them.”

Lugo, a stocky, ebullient entrepreneur, was living in Guadalajara, ranching nearby, when he vacationed in Rosarito, liked what he saw, and rented a site to move his folk art collection into. Then he started repairing furniture, most of it made from green lumber.

“And people starting making requests.” Sometimes designers bring ideas to him and he provides custom work. He has a contract with a trucking firm in San Diego and has shipped all over the United States for several years.

Soon he will be opening an office in Cabo San Lucas to provide furniture for homes and commercial enterprises there.

“We’ve already done five homes there: wooden furniture and iron work, carved doors, wooden gates with automatic openers. Seems like a lot of rich Orange County people are moving to Cabo.”

Another new Los Rios effort is making fireplace mantels and facades out of gypsum cement.

“They come out looking like old stone, almost marble or granite.” On this project Lugo is in partnership with Mike Shumard of Carlsbad, who got the idea after helping install “a real one,” a 17th-Century French mantel and over-mantel of limestone in a $35,000 project. The Lugo-Shumard products, of course, are much cheaper. Again: tomorrow’s antiques.

While Los Rios also makes wrought-iron products, a better-known site for this is Munoz, a long-established store at 908 Avenida Revolucion (between 5th and 6th streets) in downtown Tijuana, where wooden furniture, wrought-iron items and precious stained-glass lamps known as Tiffany-style have been standard for several decades.

“Some of these lamps have a thousand pieces,” owner Leonardo Munoz, grandson of the founder, said as he swung a proud arc with one arm to emphasize the numerous Tiffany reproductions, which sell for $40 to $200. Some are of classical Victorian design, others with modern stylings of roses and birds and flowers, all sizes, all colors.

Much of the glass is made near the Munoz factory, where all of the wooden furniture and the wrought-iron bookcases, shelves, gates, window bars and wine racks are produced. But some is from the Mexican interior, other from the United States. When translucent glass is needed, for lamps or windows or doorway pieces, Munoz now, Southwest style is very popular--New Mexico, mission style, Santa Fe, Pueblo. It’s all 16th Century Mexican colonial with new designs and finishes.” Munoz has Spanish style furniture and the simpler, rougher, Mexican colonial.

“We’re always doing special requests for decorators who bring a photo or drawing or design of their own.” Work for customers north of the border is common. One huge project, for instance, was handled in 1967 when the store created the wrought-iron fence and chandeliers for the Pasadena Brookside Clubhouse, adjacent to the golf course there.

Wooden doors are still a Munoz specialty, but the market has changed.

“Contractors in the United States used to put in our heavily carved doors, wrought-iron bars on the windows, and chimney mantels, and that would sell the house,” Munoz said. “Now they use cheap imitations. But we still do some entries, beveled glass and wood, usually mahogany or red oak.” Mahogany doors run from $1,000 to $2,000, with beveled glass panels on side and top, the price might be as much as double. And competition has changed.

“In 1972, there were six or eight factories. Now, there are 25, making doors and picture frames and furniture.” Others make wrought-iron products. Many are larger than Munoz, which has always tried to stay small and produce art.

And that is what Los Rios, and Antonio Galvan of Tolan and some of the similar businesses also strive to produce, art, even in a piece of furniture.