Piece Worker

When he traded in his title as Wedgwood master potter for a quiet restoration business in Los Angeles, Frank Brookes never imagined himself coloring chopsticks.

But as he works the fat tip of a red marker over the sticks, coloring engraved lettering on the soon-to-be wedding souvenirs, the British-born restorer treats the job as if he were putting on an exhibition for Prince Charles.

Which, as it happens, he has.

Brookes, 54, has also restored pieces by Dali and Picasso and taken on assignments for a slew of Hollywood hotshots. After 17 years in business, he has learned to treat the mundane just as he would the magnificent.

“It doesn’t matter if the piece is worth $20,000,” says Brookes, in a hale West Midlands accent, “or if it wouldn’t fetch 50 cents at the Rose Bowl flea market. It takes the same amount of time to do the work. So we treat them the same.”

That is to say, with absolute seriousness.

One of his more memorable jobs was also one of the most exacting. Brookes and an employee restored a massive desk and two chairs fitted with hundreds of diamond-shaped tortoise shell tiles. Each had to be removed and cleaned individually. The piece was owned, fittingly enough, by Neil Diamond.

Such projects don’t come along every day.

More often, Brookes gets the items people can’t force themselves to throw away. Objects with sentimental value, but little else.

“I’ve seen some hideous pieces over the years,” Brookes says. “I’m talking about ceramic fairies with beards and green hair. You try to tell them that it’s not worth the expense, but they want you to fix them anyway.”

Don’t get him wrong. Brookes is happy to take the work. His lament is that Southern California’s disposable glamour can value appearance more than quality. The craftsmanship needed to create or restore ceramic artwork is taken for granted.

“Most people don’t even know this craft exists,” says Brookes, whose Robertson Boulevard shop accepts porcelain, pottery, crystal, glass, jade, ivory, marble, ivory and wood.

Dreams of an Art Career

As a child, Brookes dreamed of creating art, either as a painter or potter.

He was raised in Stoke-on-Trent, a city in England known for its thousands of miles of coal tunnels and the now-shuttered bottle kilns that stretch 150 feet into the sky and once fired clay into dinnerware.

During Brookes’ youth, Stoke-on-Trent was the center of the world’s pottery manufacturing industry. Skilled hands meant the best jobs, and ceramics and pottery were as much a part of the culture as oat cakes and cheddar cheese.

Brookes’ grandmother painted ceramics for a living, while his grandfather hauled clay to factories by horse and cart and fired the bottle kilns. His father was an honored pottery salesman.

When Brookes was 14, he enrolled in art school. By 17, he had exhibited his first paintings. Six years later, he received a one-year fellowship to study industrial ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London.

“We were listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, rooting for the English [national] soccer team and marveling at how American pop art was changing the entire art world,” Brookes says. “It was a tremendously exciting period to be living in London and studying art.”

Brookes’ own style as a potter was influenced by Bernard Leach, one of Britain’s most celebrated potters. By reintroducing techniques such as throwing up a spout and pulling a handle, Leach ushered in the return of hand techniques during a period when methods of mass production had made such skills obsolete.

At 30, Brookes landed a job as pottery designer with Wedgwood, one of the most renowned manufacturers of ceramic ware. Two years later, he was assigned to the public relations division as a traveling representative. The position would take him around the world and eventually lead to his emigration to the United States.

For six years, Brookes led a glamorous and fast-paced life of travel, lecturing about the company and performing pottery exhibitions at retail stores in major cities.

“It was an incredible time to be young and single,” says Brookes, who flew into a different city nearly every week, bringing his pottery wheel and bags of clay, always staying in the finest hotels. “I performed at two stores a day, did television and newspaper interviews, and signed pieces of pottery every day. Then at night I partied.”

Eventually, the demands of the job caught up with him and, at 36, Brookes resigned. A year later he moved to California, where an aunt had lived for many years. The United States, however, did not have the same career opportunities in ceramic design. So Brookes turned to restoration.

A Staff of Restorers

At 7 in the morning, Brookes Restoration bustles with activity behind its inconspicuous brick facade. The shop employs seven full-time restorers, many of whom Brookes himself trained.

Inside an office cluttered with damaged and restored ceramics, including a life-size Humphrey Bogart head and a 3-foot-long decapitated giraffe, Rolando Contreras prepares to airbrush. He has replaced the tip of a broken harp on a porcelain relief piece and must now match its color with the rest of the instrument. The relief piece, which depicts a mother and baby reclining on a hillside, has been valued at $250. It will cost $60 to restore.

In a room downstairs, Mario Moran files down a chip in the lip of a crystal goblet by pressing it into a spinning sandpaper belt. Moran will use four belts to complete the process, each a different grade. The last is one he created himself. Brookes charges $25 and up to repair a chip, depending on its size and the delicacy of the crystal.

In a third office, scattered with dozens of paint containers, paper towels smeared with dabs of color and glasses flowering with paint brushes, Martin Thompson sands the back of a limited-edition Boehm porcelain swan. Worth as much as $7,500, it will cost at least $500 to restore. Resting the swan in his lap, Thompson uses a swatch of sandpaper affixed to a thin wooden stick to reach a precarious spot between the wings.

It is this kind of attention to detail that customers say they appreciate most about Brookes Restoration.

“They know that quality restoration takes time,” says Larry Strichman of Los Angeles, who collects archeological antiquities and early European pieces.

He has been bringing pieces to Brookes Restoration since the Northridge earthquake in 1994. “When I asked how long my piece would take, they said they would call me when it was ready. That’s when I knew I was in good hands.”

Earthquake Casualties

After the earthquake, people lined up with boxes full of damaged pieces. Brookes hired 20 additional workers and did not accept orders that needed to be completed in fewer than six months.

Still, Brookes says, it was a hectic period and hardly worth the added revenue.

“We had this incredible job of labeling and keeping track of hundreds of boxes,” he says. “You’d think that all the business would get you rich, but jobs still take the same amount of time. That’s why you’ll never become wealthy as a restorer.”

Still single and without children, Brookes shares a Silver Lake apartment with a friend and spends most of his free time attending antique shows, swap meets and flea markets, all the while looking for ways to grow his business.

One idea that has caught on is crystal and glass engravings, which he says account for 20% of total revenue. Brookes is hoping another idea, designing tile furniture, will do just as well.

Short of unloading a couple of expensive Wedgwood dinner sets, however, Brookes has yet to pull together enough money for a retirement plan. That’s all right, though, because he has no such plans any time soon.

“I don’t even think about whether I’m working or not,” Brookes says. “Sometimes I can scarcely tell the difference. This is just what I like to do.”

Sam Bruchey can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.

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What to Do When You Hit the Breaking Point

If you break a valued piece of porcelain or crystal, restorer Frank Brookes of Los Angeles offers these tips:

* Do your best to collect all the pieces.

* Don’t assume an item can’t be restored if a piece is missing.

* Manufacturers generally do not restore damaged ware.

* Always seek referrals before giving a restorer any business.

* Decide how much you want to spend, and then ask what degree of restoration that will buy.

* Restoration can only make a piece look like new, not necessarily function like new.