For the Birds : Carpenter Branches Out With Folk Art Houses Made of Recyclables : ARTISANS: Spotlighting makers of handcrafted goods

Rob James is a detail man. Dreaming up another feature he can add to his already lavishly detailed birdhouses keeps this hyperkinetic 29-year-old running.

“I stay up all night sometimes when I’m working out a new idea,” he says. “It took me two and a half hours to figure out how to do my first working hinge, but now it’s one of my trademarks. I put them on all my houses.”

It is those details that sell the birdhouses.

“Men, especially, like that fact that all these little itty-bitty pieces work,” says Mary Lou Heard of Heard’s Country Gardens in Westminster, which sells the birdhouses. “The doors and shutters open on hinges, and the rain gutters really drain. They’re like models.”

Women like the details, too, she says, but perhaps for more subliminal reasons. James’ birdhouses are like dollhouses, Heard says; details such as attic vents, chimney flues, screened windows and weather vanes are what make them seem real, luring the observer into fantasy.

James understands all too well how people get drawn into his rustic miniature houses. It happens to him all the time.

“This is the only thing I’ve ever done--except professional motocross racing--that I haven’t got burned out on,” he says. “In fact, my wife and I fight because she can’t get me away from the workbench. I fall asleep out here sometimes.”

His wife, Zena, is the person who suggested James start building birdhouses in the first place.

When her husband was recuperating from knee surgery after an accident on a carpentry job, Zena and her boss, Linda Madden Fox, put their heads together to come up with a project to keep him busy. Fox owns a company that sells dried flower wreaths and other handicrafts; Zena makes most of the wreaths.

Why not build some birdhouses out of this funky old lumber Fox happened to have lying around, the women suggested. The birdhouses might complement their wreath sales, they told him.

“Birdhouse, uh, right,” James said skeptically, according to Zena. But he built some anyway. They all sold. He built a few more and took them to the antique flea market at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. A Japanese tourist bought out his entire stock.

Maybe he was onto something, James realized, heading back to his workbench. Vintage Birdhouses, a full-time business producing one-of-a-kind, folk art bird dwellings, is the result. Today James sells his creations to nearly 40 stores throughout the West and has customers willing to wait up to a year to buy one of his custom-crafted creations despite what are usually triple-digit price tags--the birdhouses cost from $75 to $600 or more.

James is not worried about running out of inspiration. The more houses he builds, he says, the more ideas he gets. The materials themselves are the starting point, he says.

From the beginning James has worked only with recycled materials--old lumber from abandoned buildings, sheets of tarnished tin, rusty window screens.

“The only thing new in the houses is the nails,” he says. “Everything else is old. I don’t paint them either.” Shadows of pigment from the wood’s original paint jobs do give tints of color to most of his pieces, however.

Five-year-old daughter Tarrell is developing quite an eye for what will make good “new” material, James says. “We go out scouting together every few days after I pick her up from school. She thinks that’s a lot of fun.”

The more weathered-looking the birdhouses, the more customers seem to like them, Heard says. “If you love country, you look for things that are as non-glitzy as they can be,” she says. “Rob’s work is perfect. Pure country.”

James himself has never lived in the country. His home on the outskirts of Riverside is less urban than his former residence in Garden Grove, but it’s still hardly backwoods. And, other than driving around on material expeditions, he doesn’t do field trips to research architectural details.

But his birdhouses manage to take people into the country nonetheless.

“I can imagine myself a little person living in any of these houses,” says Heard, surveying several models perched on poles in her demonstration garden. “I daydream about owning a country cottage like these. Maybe that’s why I have such a hard time parting with them when customers want one.”