SARASOTA - One of our first Living Green segments several years ago featured a Suncoast business that finds new uses for old items. Sarasota Architectural Salvage continues that mission, finding great success in creating new furniture with a rich history.
Waiting for a new home near the front of the store is a gorgeous dining room table. It's also a piece of Downtown Sarasota history. The southern yellow pine is from paneling found buried beneath layers of wall material inside an old restaurant on Main Street.
"It's very exciting to be able to hand off not just really beautifully fabricated piece but also a little bit of history along with it and it is the story that keeps people excited about this stuff," says Sarasota Architectural Salvage founder Jesse White.
White started Sarasota Architectural Salvage with a goal of keeping materials out of our landfills and finding new uses for them. His business has evolved to include unique furniture and decorative pieces like mirrors, created by local artisans using salvaged materials and recycled paint. Vanity cabinets that feature old windows as doors and a kitchen island with three inch thick wood salvaged from an industrial building in Tampa. All of them, keeping a bit of history alive.
"We try to go back to the early days of those buildings so that we can try to find historical photographs and then actually take those pieces and give that to our customers as sort of a little story that goes along with it," says White.
Perhaps no materials here have a richer story than these old hand painted timbers salvaged from the John Ringling Towers before it was demolished more than a decade ago.
"This is sort of the holy grail of salvage, you very rarely have a historic building, a beautiful building that has such a rich history that gets demolished and there's materials years later that become available," says White.
White says people are creating mantels, tables, headboards and more from one of the area's most historic buildings and what a story that goes along with them.
Sarasota Architectural Salvage was recently named Florida Retailer of the Year by the Florida Retail Federation. The business is just off Central Avenue, north of Downtown Sarasota. You can spend hours roaming the store, taking in all of the history there. For more information, visit
http://www.sarasotasalvage.com/
