VENTURA : Restorers of Antiques Busy After Quake

Susanne and Gary Gottfried didn’t lose anything in the earthquake, but they’re still cleaning up after its damage.

The Ventura couple, who say they’re the only fine art and antiques restorers between Hollywood and Santa Barbara, have all the work they can handle since the Jan. 17 temblor rocked the county and the rest of the Southland.

Among their customers is Jeri Morris of Fillmore, whose century-old French porcelain vase, passed down from her grandmother, was shattered.

Morris, who was hoping to pass the heirloom on to her daughter, swept up the pieces of the vase, put them in a box and took them to the Gottfrieds’ Just Enterprises.

The cost of their work can be high--the couple charged $2,000 to repair a Chinese vase that broke into 60 pieces and took them more than a week to reconstruct--so the Gottfrieds encourage customers to consider whether the item is worth the expense.

But Morris was unfazed. “It’s not the monetary value that matters, it’s the memories,” she said. “I’m one of those kind of people who would make a run to save the family pictures before I’d go for anything of value.”

In their cluttered studio, a backlog of broken and battered antiques is strewn over work tables.

The objects include shattered ceramics as well as dented and twisted precious metals. A pile of 60 pieces of what was once a plate is a puzzle waiting to be solved.

One key to restoring a precious heirloom is finding all the pieces, the Gottfrieds said.

“We had a huge Chinese vase that we repaired for a woman that was missing a piece,” said Gary Gottfried. “It turned out that the piece had shot across the room more than 30 feet and lodged between some pillows on the couch.”

Even without the piece, however, the couple say they could repair the vase by matching the size of the missing piece and painting an identical pattern on it.

“Our job is to make it look as close to the original as it can be,” Gary said. “To the customer, the repairs are almost impossible to detect.”