Via Community News Service, a VTSU-Castleton internship, for Mountain Times
RUTLAND — Where most local residents see an unfixable antique collecting dust or falling apart in the garage, one Rutland workshop is vowing to bring those pieces back to life.
Heritage Workshop, which opened last year, has been meticulously restoring family heirlooms and once-retired pieces, with owner Emily Field and her specific educational background hard at work.
Field studied history as an undergraduate and worked with historical costuming.
After completing her degree, she attended graduate school at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. There, she studied decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
“I really love the hands-on aspect of history, and I consider both sewing and furniture restoration to be a utilitarian art form. I love the idea of being able to use art, and especially history,” she said.
Her graduate major focused on the importance of objects in history, including art and furnishings.
“We did surveys of decorative arts that covered from ancient history to the 1980s, the Good Design movement, how damage and decay affected the conservation of objects and furniture. I even took a textiles class with the conservator at [The Metropolitan Museum of Art],” Field said.
Once she completed her program at Bard, she followed her parents to Vermont when they retired. Shortly after, she moved to California to work at Death Valley National Park as an assistant curator at Scotty’s Castle in the park’s northern mountains. She eventually left that job and returned to Vermont to work in restoration.
“I realized I wanted to do something more hands-on than museum curation. Museums don’t have any funding anymore, and it’s so hard to get work done and to save the objects that we’re trying to save. I wanted to do that more actively,” Field said.
Now, a year after opening Heritage, she said business is booming.
“I thought, ‘OK, we’ll open up, and we’ll get a few projects, we’ll put our name out there.’ It seems like so many people have been waiting with their things to get them fixed, because Vermont is full of so many wonderful family heirlooms. It is really a specialty field. You don’t want to try to fix your own rocker if you think you’re going to make it worse or something and upset your grandma,” Field said.
Her partner, Justin Brown, said their timeline for a piece can range from several days to a few weeks.
“We’ve just had such an influx of business. Some days, there are three or four chairs getting done and put back together, and then other days it’s sort of just all hands on deck, sanding a table down to be refinished. I think there’s definitely a bit of demand that had been lacking,” he said.
Field said some of her favorite projects include overhauls of restorations that are often in complete disrepair.
Customer Warren Kimble brought in a rocking chair that belonged to his grandmother, hoping to bring the aged, yet sentimental, piece back to life.
“It was in my house all my life in New Jersey. It was rickety and falling apart, and the chair is nothing notable. It’s almost ugly. If I put it in an auction today and it sold for $5 or $10, I would be lucky. But it had sentimental value,” he said.
Field said the shop is busy, but the result of the long projects is what she looks forward to, adding, “I can’t wait to see their face when they get their heirloom back, when they didn’t think it would survive.”
Kimble said the restored chair is better than he could have imagined.
“Patience is a virtue, and you get something good out of patience, don’t you?” he said.
Field said once a piece is brought into the workshop, they assess it to get an estimate and draw up a step-by-step process, deciding what should be addressed during restoration. The shop currently has a six-month waiting list.
Heritage Workshop is located at 148 N. Main St. in Rutland.
“We’ve been really overwhelmed in a wonderful way, and people have been so excited to come in and see that we’re open. It’s been great,” Field said.
For more information, visit: heritageworkshopvt.com