That Authentic Touch

Liz Gordon can look at a Victorian sideboard and know instantly what kind of drawer pulls it needs. Or a Spanish Colonial door and suggest the appropriate pulls, latches and hinges.

She can tell you what kind of switch plates belong on your 1930s kitchen walls or the correct slipper shade for your Deco light fixture.

The peppery Gordon can answer almost any question about home restoration hardware, and then she can probably sell you the right item. In a sense, she says, she provides a community service: “For the home restorer, it is invaluable to have a place where you can walk in and find the little bits and pieces that it takes to keep a house original.”

That place in mid-city Los Angeles is Liz’s Antique Hardware on La Brea Avenue, where the inventory includes more than a million pieces of original doorknobs, mail slots, hinges, latches, knockers, bells, racks, knobs, switch plates and other rusty items. (“Rust is good--we don’t polish anything,” notes the owner.)

Since its opening in 1992, the store has become a regular stop for any serious or amateur decorator, its success shaped by a blend of Gordon’s self-taught expertise and her realization that “people need help.”

Not only has she accumulated what Sunset magazine described in May 1966 as “the mother lode of antique hardware,” the store is organized. The million bits and pieces are arranged chronologically from 1850 to 1960, providing a nirvana for any customer who has been digging through piles of salvage-yard junk looking for period curtain rods. Prices range from $1 for a tiny rosette to $7,000 for a light fixture, with the average between $18 and $38.

“There should be a 12-step program for the addiction to Liz’s Hardware--I almost live there when I’m in L.A.,” says William Sofield, a New York-based designer who is restoring a Craftsman bungalow in Laurel Canyon to serve as his home and West Coast studio.

“Basically I do love beautiful hardware,” says Sofield, whose recent projects have included redesigning the Gucci flagship stores, including the new one in Beverly Hills.

“It’s something you touch and feel and use. I tend to splurge on something you use every day.” He had just found the octagonal back plate for a doorknob he’d been searching for. “Most of the pieces at Liz’s are tiny, tiny details that a lot of people wouldn’t take the trouble to preserve. I think homeowners starting to restore, especially in Los Angeles, are realizing the level of detailing that was originally there.”

And the home remodeling boom is sending waves of homeowners to stores from Home Depot to Restoration Hardware.

“I think people more and more are crazy about their houses,” Gordon says. “The home has become the new fashion industry.”

Statistics back that up.

“Americans spent $130 billion on remodeling and reconstruction in 1998, more than on new home building,” says Bret Martin of the National Assn. of the Remodeling Industry. That’s estimated to rise to $135 billion this year, he says. “Historical restoration is definitely a part of that, but we don’t have a breakdown.”

An Indirect Route

For Gordon, 43, who likes to say that “paint and hardware are the most inexpensive ways to change the look of your house,” this growing appetite for nesting means good business. In recent years, she has added a hardware gallery with new products and has embarked on her own product design.

“We don’t want to limit ourselves to the past,” she says. The store also offers a mail-order and Web site hardware matching service.

But most of the business is antique hardware from the Victorian era through Art Deco and the disco ‘70s. After 21 years, Gordon considers herself knowledgeable, but “you never quit learning,” she says.

She backed into the superior salvage business. A native Chicagoan (“I grew up in a normal house--all my family are hairdressers”), she attended one semester of college, then went to work at a succession of jobs, including cocktail waitressing, with the idea of going to law school. “I had aspirations to become a career woman, which unfortunately have been met,” she says wryly.

One summer, visiting Cape Cod just as the shops were closing for the season, she found herself buying antiques, thinking she might resell them. When she returned to Chicago, her back seat was loaded with everything from little glass cocktail shakers to a mammoth oak fireplace mantle broken down in three pieces. She bought a van and began learning how to search alleys where people were throwing out side-by-side oak dressers and wooden tools and crocks, not realizing their antique value.

When she took her finds to the Kane County flea market in St. Charles, Ill., and made $400 in two days, she was hooked. She borrowed $3,500 to buy out a warehouse full of furniture, hardware and junk. “It was a mishmash. I thought, ‘Gosh, if I could organize this stuff, there are people out there who need it.’ And I did.”

As the business grew from her backyard to a large warehouse, she cleaned out estates, dealing in all sorts of furniture, books and glassware. Those years as a general antique dealer were invaluable for learning hardware, she says.

“Without that experience,” she says, “I couldn’t have acquired the knowledge of what goes on with an oak highboy dresser, such as flat fronts or serpentine fronts, the hardware, the casters, the drawer pull that breaks down into three more categories. . . .”

Gordon moved to San Diego, liquidating everything but hardware and lights, thus becoming a specialist.

“I got married, and we had two stores next to each other, and for five years I commuted to Los Angeles, selling antique hardware at the Rose Bowl flea markets,” she says.

After her marriage broke up in 1992, she made a permanent move.

“I found my location in a week,” she says. She also found the perfect manager, Terri Hartman.

“She’s the opposite of me,” Gordon says. “Terri is tall, and I am short, and she is incredibly well-educated with a master’s degree in architectural history, while I learned this business by hanging on with my fingernails.”

Hartman, who was working as a researcher and wanted something more dynamic, says the timing was perfect. “I pay attention to details, and Liz is the big-picture person, so we are a dynamic team.”

The two collaborate on an elegant newsletter that goes to set designers, decorators, architects and other professionals, keeping the store’s name before the trade.

“It’s my way of advertising,” Gordon says. And they’re completing their first book, “The History of American Hardware,” for Reganbooks of HarperCollins.

A Quiet Presence

Only a modest sign and a brass bed on the sidewalk identify Liz’s Antique Hardware, which is tucked among the antique stores, restaurants and galleries on La Brea Avenue.

A visitor entering the store crammed with urns, tubs, mirrors and a spiral staircase is almost overwhelmed by the densely packed hardware. But the sections are clearly marked--door hardware, furniture hardware, window hardware, casters, plumbing. On a typical afternoon, the crowded store has the same quiet air as a library reading room, as customers browse through the hinges and casters.

Gordon, wearing her customary casual blue-denim shirt and black pants, leads the way to the rear, an open warehouse and workshop.

“Every piece of hardware is looked at, maybe repaired,” she says.

“Before I go off on a buying trip, I get reacquainted with the whole store,” adds Gordon, who spends four to six months a year on the road. Home is a loft in Los Angeles she converted herself with used building materials. “It has an industrial feel with vintage hardware and lights,” she says.

For buying trips she shops flea markets, antique malls and swap meets across the U.S. and in Europe.

“No, I won’t say where I shop,” she says flatly. “It’s very competitive. Everybody’s going retail, everybody’s going designers, from the mega-stores on up, or down.”

Neither Gordon nor Hartman has regular contact with customers.

“The staff is the bedrock of our business,” says Hartman, tucked in her cubbyhole office filled with paperwork. Customers fall into two categories, she says. “First is the design trade, and these are people who know what they want. Then there are the people doing their own homes, and if we are lucky they come in with a piece of something, so we can match it.”

The staff gets ongoing training sessions, says Gordon, who warns any new employee to expect to be inundated with inventory. “Some people like it, and some don’t.”

Carlos Castaneda, who joined the staff four years ago, loves it.

“I knew nothing about hardware, but Liz gave me some books, and I took a locksmith course,” he says. “Now I know everything in the store, from the smallest screws to the biggest bathtubs. I know what’s in every box and can tell you on the telephone if we have something.”

That’s the kind of service that a customer scouting for a cast-iron Victorian door hinge appreciates.

“Liz’s is a good resource because it offers both original materials and duplications, or reproductions of materials,” says Ted Wells, president of the Society of Architectural Historians in Southern California.

His architectural firm, Ted Wells Mark Noble in Laguna Niguel, is finding restoration and renovation to be an increasingly large percentage of its work, he says. “The perception that we don’t have an architectural history here is wrong.”

In addition to the big market for high-quality renovation and restoration, his firm is finding lots of homeowners are looking for period hardware to jazz up so-so tract houses or cottage-cheese ceiling condos.

“We’re getting a bunch of people with houses built 30 years ago that are not very interesting. They are realizing that a beautiful home does not want to be elaborate.”

Demographics show that people are staying in their houses longer, he says.

“We are seeing people staying put and making their homes architecturally interesting, and they will go to a salvage company or to Liz’s to add some character or soul to their houses.”

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* Liz’s Antique Hardware, 453 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles; (323) 939-4403; https://www.LAHardware.com.

* Connie Koenenn can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].