Steel Life

Peggy and Burke Byrnes didn’t have an environmental agenda when they started rescuing old steel furniture from junkyards to refurbish.

“Our interest was in the style,” Peggy said, “but now we really like the idea that we’re saving and recycling.”

For the last five years, their Sonrisa furniture showroom on Beverly Boulevard has featured the substantial desks, chairs, filing cabinets, pharmacy cabinets and workbenches that filled the American workplaces, schools and military bases of the 1940s and ‘50s. Left behind as too chunky and heavy, the imposing, battle-ax furniture, manufactured by such giants as Steelcase and General Fireproofing is coming back into vogue.

A new generation is discovering the double-pedestal tanker desks and ample multisectional lawyers’ bookcases of industrial America. With the chipped paint and rust laboriously removed, the satin-finished steel reveals strikingly contemporary furniture.

“This furniture is ultramodern and so sexy,” said Donya Fiorentino-Oldman, whose home office is jampacked with Sonrisa vintage metal. She and her husband, actor Gary Oldman, have just moved into a Mediterranean-style house, and the industrial furniture works perfectly with the dark wood floors and Malibu tile fireplace in her office.

“I have a gigantic desk and a 1940s barrister’s bookcase that I use to display old cameras and art books. It is so functional and very much back to basics.”

In a digital world where everything seems to be “virtual,” vintage metal furniture conveys a comforting presence, for home or office, say its admirers. When Michael and Shawn Piller formed their father-son entertainment production company, they renovated a 1930s glass-blowing factory in Hollywood for their offices and turned to vintage.

“My dad did ‘Star Treks,’ and I did independent films,” Shawn said. “Now we’re working together, and vintage metal furniture is perfect for our building. We have the industrial vibe going.”

He likes the stability of the big desks and bookshelves.

“It is solid, and it says, ‘We’re not going to go away.’ ”

Adam Blackman put it more bluntly: “You can’t kill the stuff.”

As co-owner of Blackman Cruz on La Cienega, Blackman specializes in unusual vintage furniture. He jumped into the vintage movement early with a pink medical cabinet he brought to the shop seven years ago. Since then he has focused on the earlier, very heavy pieces, he said, in both clear lacquered and in soft blues and yellows. Vintage metal is heavy-duty compared with most of today’s particle-board or plastic offerings, he said. “Sonrisa has done very well, and I applaud their success.” As a result of customer acceptance, what began as a casual business for the Byrneses, both in their early 60s, has developed into a new career.

“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” said Burke, who has retired from a 30-year acting career that spanned Broadway, feature films and television series. It was his interest in vintage steel furniture that helped turn Peggy’s Mexican folk art business in a totally new direction after she moved to the Beverly Boulevard location in 1991.

Venturing Into Junkyards

“We had some Southwest furniture with a Mexican feeling, and kind of edged into vintage metal,” she said. Burke recalls a rusty steel glider that he striped down, sanded and polished to a satin sheen for indoor use. It was snapped up almost immediately. So they did a few more and started haunting junkyards and flea markets.

“It just took off,” Peggy said.

Now they are buying old metal furniture by the lot rather than a piece at a time. Their refinishing workplace in the back of the store has been replaced by a 5,000-square-foot warehouse on Jefferson where a crew of five works full time on refinishing. They have retail showrooms in Los Angeles and New York.

The Byrneses were sitting in their light, spacious showroom, surrounded by rescued furniture, a shimmering gray mix of credenzas, tank tables and wall-size basket lockers, intermingled with film cans and reels, soap dishes, staplers, juicers and oversized wall clocks.

Furniture prices range from several hundred dollars for chairs to about $2,000 for large bookcases and credenzas.

In the Byrneses’ loft office on the second floor, a steel coffee table is piled with old books and catalogs that document America’s Machine Age development with its utopian faith in technology. Vintage steel furniture echoes the dynamism of an era that saw the rise of skyscrapers, high-suspension bridges and superhighways.

“I’ve gotten interested in that period, and I love the photography,” Burke said. “I think people like this furniture because it satisfies a nostalgic need for a little bit of history.”

“The names are great,” added his wife. “Steelcase, Art Metal Co. and Shaw-Walker. Simmons made the furniture for hospitals and hotels.”

The working partnership seems natural for the Byrneses, who have shared interests all their lives. They grew up together in Massapequa, N.Y., on Long Island, and dated “off and on” through college. Peggy went to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and eventually became a librarian, and Burke joined the Marines.

“We got married in 1961, my last year in the Marines,” he said. “I was a jock and had football and wrestling scholarships.”

It was Burke’s acting career that brought them to New York (he appeared on Broadway in “The Great White Hope” and did lots of commercials), then in the late 1960s to California. “It was difficult for me,” Peggy said. “We had just bought a brownstone in Brooklyn. I came with a couple of summer dresses and an iron. I was not planning to stay.”

Starting Out With Mexican Art

But Burke stayed busy with roles in more than 100 television shows and 20 feature films. Eventually both were won over by the laid-back Southern California lifestyle. Peggy had discovered Mexican art (“in New York they didn’t teach us about anything south of Texas”) and, without benefit of experience in business or importing, began traveling to Mexico and discovering “amazing craftsmen” in remote villages. She began buying for her Sonrisa folk-art shop, which, over the years, has moved from downtown Los Angeles to Melrose Avenue to Beverly Boulevard.

By the early 1990s, she had tired of the demanding travel schedule and was looking for a new venture.

“Vintage metal furniture was a natural transition for me,” Peggy said. “We are attracted to the everyday, whether it’s art or furniture. This is everyman’s furniture, and it seems to come from some kind of need, and with this furniture, it was the need for something functional.”

They’ve enjoyed some big finds, such as a huge load of desks and chairs from Caltrans, which had been stored under the 101 Freeway.

And their greatest coup was learning that the landmark Southern Pacific Railway Building in San Francisco was getting rid of its steel furniture from every style through the 1970s. The Byrneses had two days to tear through the building with yellow chalk to mark their choices, checking with each other by walkie-talkie.

“It was the gold rush,” Peggy said.

Though the desks and filing cabinets are their bread and butter, Burke said, “what distinguished us from other companies is that we hunt for the odd, unusual pieces, like the antique medical cabinets.”

He indicated an elegant steel roll-top desk with brass trim and a delicate mottled surface. They turn up one or two roll-tops a year, he said. This one was painted brown faux wood, he said.

“You never know, when you start stripping the wood, what you’ll find,” he said.

An even bigger treasure is a massive World War II Morse code lamp.

“It was painted red,” Burke said. “It’s the kind of thing we love to find. We were in Seattle for a wedding but did a little business too.” The lamp, he added, was sold before it even got to their showroom floor to an entertainment industry executive.

“Our customers tend to be creative people, and a lot are in the entertainment industry.”

At Karen Alweil Studio showroom in the wholesale L.A. Mart, Jayne Alweil says the same thing: “Young, hip trendsetters are buying this vintage steel furniture. And we sell a lot for children’s bedrooms--it’s very versatile. For the gift show, we put sliding-glass doors on the lawyer’s bookcase and displayed it at the gift show as bathroom furniture, stacked with towels and accessories.” Her showroom represents Twenty Gauge Vintage American Steel Furniture, which was launched two years ago in North Hollywood by J.C. Hyrb.

“The movement started in Los Angeles for sure,” Hyrb said. “There are a few more people dabbling in the business--you can find the furniture all over the place--but it’s just starting to catch on.”

And, as many a novice has learned, after dragging home a rusty chair to refurbish, the process is difficult.

Doing the Hard Work by Hand

First, Hyrb said, the metal must be stripped (usually dipped in acid or sandblasted) and then repeatedly sanded down by hand, using various grades of sandpaper.

“Then it has to be sealed properly with the right clear coat. A desk roughly takes about 15 hours to work, from start to finish.”

A typical customer, Hyrb said, will buy a desk and chair, then do a little research on the mid-century period and get more adventurous, asking for basket lockers or the lawyer’s bookcases. “It’s taking off.”

Karrie Laughlin, editor of Green Office magazine, which monitors recycled furniture, isn’t so sure. While applauding the comeback of anything saved from the landfill, she thinks the appeal of the hefty furniture is probably limited.

“Obviously, it’s very heavy and has a strong retro look,” she said. “What the Byrneses offer is fabulous design and a great natural look. They’ve positioned themselves for the upscale market.”

Laughlin acknowledges, though, that design-conscious consumers have warmed up to the natural metal look, once thought too cold for residential use.

“Five years ago I wouldn’t have wanted an industrial kitchen, and now I have granite and stainless steel,” she said.

And at Pottery Barn, which just introduced metal desks, side tables and file cabinets into its 110 stores, vice president for product design Celia Tejada says customer response to vintage metal is excellent.

Because recycling isn’t practical for its volume, the chain found an original manufacturer from the 1950s, she said.

“They still had the old tooling, so we put them back to work.” The set of desk, table and cabinet ranges from $1,500 to $2,000, she said.

“It’s a serious purchase, but with the home office becoming more and more important, it was the right time to bring these gray oldies back into our home,” Tejada said. “‘More and more people are understanding it.”

Sonrisa expects to grow, although Peggy Byrnes says they haven’t set their direction yet. “Our sales volume doubled in the last year to more than $2 million, but we’re still a small business.”

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Connie Koenenn can be reached at connie.koenenn@latimes.com.