Beau Kimball, manager of Salvage One Architectural Artifacts in Chicago, gives Kitty Bartholomew, host of HGTV's Kitty Bartholomew: You're Home, a tour of a 100,000-square foot warehouse filled with treasures from the past. Architectural items from old buildings -- including light fixtures, doors and door hardware, fireplace mantels, stairway parts, bathtubs, sinks and garden ornaments -- provide plenty of inspiration for adding a little history to your home or garden. Salvage One has more than 60,000 pieces of door hardware -- buckets of doorknobs (figure A), drawers overflowing with cabinet knobs, keyhole escutcheons and door hinges, and walls of hanging doorknob back plates. The choices for adding a bit of history to your home can be a bit overwhelming. Replace standard doorknobs in a new or old home with lovely antique styles in glass or brass. Or install a row of old doorknobs by the back door to serve as coat hooks or in the bathroom to catch towels. Use them at the window as curtain-rod finials or clever drapery tiebacks. Consider using original cast hinges on doors: they're about the same price as a reproduction cast hinge, and because they're not recasts of recasts, they have much cleaner detail than new reproductions (figure B). The time you'll spend cleaning them up is well worth the nicer piece you get. In an architectural-salvage warehouse, not everything fits in the carry-it-home-in-your pocket category. You'll also find old buffets, fireplace surrounds or enough paneling to cover a room. The most expensive item in the warehouse, an entire room of French nouveau paneling, can be yours for about $64,000 (figure C). Garden accessories and furnishings may also be found among architectural salvage. Lacking a long history of interesting garden ornaments in this country, we recycle unusual items into garden pieces -- for example, old finials and urns and other decorative stoneware originally built into the exterior face of commercial buildings (figure D). Because they're weatherproof and decorative, they're perfect for the garden. The garden look is popular inside as well as out. Old garden benches are making their way inside, gracing the sitting rooms of office buildings and homes. Big iron planters, topped with a sheet of glass, are used both commercially and residentially as display tables. An unusual one-of-a-kind coffee table is made from a cast-iron department-store railing set in a metal frame and topped with a piece of glass, and millwork trim and corner-block bull's-eyes can become an ingenious frame for a new mirror.
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