Carving Out a Special Place in the Market : Decor: Costa Mesa firm specializes in everything from a hand-shaped 200-ton stone fountain for a hotel to smaller items for the living room.

Over here’s a bronze cupid. It’s a mere $3,000. Here’s a reclining marble lady, only $10,500. A stone fireplace with carvings of leaves, just $7,800.

Welcome to the showroom of Goodwin International, where they’ve got just the thing to dress up your garden or drawing room--if your tastes run to hand-carved Italian marble and your pocketbook can stand the pain.

Oh, and these prices are wholesale: They’re what Goodwin charges the interior designers, landscape architects and contractors who need a stone lion to sit in front of a new hotel or a washtub-sized terra-cotta tree planter for a shopping center. If you’re at the end of this luxury chain, the merchandise is going to cost you even more.

Take the 200-ton stone fountain Goodwin obtained for the Princeville Mirage resort on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. It is, says Goodwin, the largest hand-carved fountain to come out of Italy in the last 150 years or so, and it’s going to cost the owners of Princeville $1 million when it’s finally installed. It had to be cut into 200 pieces and shipped in 11 trailer-truck-sized boxes to the island, where four craftsmen from Italy will begin installing it in August.

Tim Goodwin, one of the company’s owners, will be there to make sure they get it right.

“What we’re doing,” he says of this little company, “is creating the antiques of the future.”

The Princeville fountain, for instance, took 12 Italian artisans nine months to carve. They chopped away 900 tons of stone to get down to the 200-ton behemoth, which, at 22 feet high and 40 feet in diameter, is actually a copy of a smaller fountain in front of a hotel in Cliveden, England. The hotel was once the home of Lady Astor, who bought the original fountain in Paris. Enter Christopher Skase, the young Australian financial whiz who once owned Princeville. He became fond of the fountain while staying at the hotel and, in true mogul style, decided to build an even bigger one to sit at the entrance to his resort.

But--again in true mogul style--Skase’s high-flying television-and-resort empire crashed and burned a year or so ago. Now his partners own Princeville.

In the meantime, Goodwin flew to England, photographed and measured the fountain and then flew to Vicenza, Italy, where he showed the craftsmen the pictures and told them to start whacking away.

Then there’s the controversial $250,000, 12-foot bronze statue of the Hawaiian King Kamehameha that, Goodwin says, is gathering dust somewhere in a garage at the resort. The ceremonial headdress is covered with eight pounds of 24-karat gold, which was applied by one of the goldsmiths the Vatican uses to restore its art.

Skase’s people ordered that one, too, but it turns out the islanders don’t like it, says Goodwin, because Kamehameha was never king on Kauai. But Skase didn’t want a statue of the real king of the island, says Goodwin, because that king had once offered to sell Kauai to the Russians.

The statue--and some of the other pricey items Goodman orders carved in Italy--looks enough like an antiquity that Italy’s art bureaucracy sometimes asks to check the crates to make sure it’s not Greek or Roman art being smuggled out of the country. When they saw the size of the invoice accompanying the crated statue of the Hawaiian king, for instance, they insisted on peeking inside.

Is some of it kitsch? You bet.

“There might be something I can’t stand,” says Goodwin diplomatically. “But we try not to let that get in the way of the old saying: ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ ”

On the green carpeting in Goodwin’s showroom sprawl winged lions frozen in mid-roar, smiling cherubs, soaring eagles and fireplaces with ornate carvings, all in the pale grays and whites.

Outside, on what was once a parking lot that Goodwin has painted green, are more terra-cotta planters. They are mostly a sandy reddish-brown color, but in the back room of the shop, Goodwin employees can paint the terra-cotta--which is clay that’s baked using a special process--any color.

Why all of these massive, solid pieces in a quiet, somewhat obscure industrial neighborhood?

Because nearby are some of the nation’s best-known landscape design and planning firms. It’s home to a slew of urban planning firms, designers, architects, landscape experts and consultants. Some of them have contracts all over the world: designing a hotel in Singapore, landscaping a resort in Mexico, designing a golf course in Hawaii.

There are three companies in the nation, Goodwin says, that specialize in importing these extremely expensive hand-carved planters and fountains. Two are in Los Angeles. The other is Goodwin International.

In fact Goodwin, 37, of Laguna Beach, started the business in 1983 after working at the two Los Angeles companies, International Terra Cotta and Sculpture Design Imports. His mother, Ede Goodwin Newton, who is president of the company, and two friends put up the money. Goodwin handles the marketing side; his mother runs the financial side. It’s a lucrative little business, they say: The company sold $4.5 million worth of stone lions and fountains and planters last year and profit margins are high.

The company has sold terra-cotta tree planters to the Brea Mall and the Fashion Island mall in Newport Beach and fountains to the new-town developer Mission Viejo Co.

Then there are also the few wealthy people who come in and look around for a new birdbath for the garden or a marble mantel for the fireplace. They’re only about a quarter of the business, though.

“We don’t really sell to the general public,” says Goodwin. “They’d come in and be shocked when they saw the prices.”