Category: Lost Art Press Storefront

Don’t you hate how every Lost Art Press project takes years to complete?

Me too.

After more than three years of work, Lucy and I have found a building for Lost Art Press where we will live out the rest of our days, making stuff and writing about it. We have come to an agreement with the owner of a circa-1890 commercial building with a living space above. If nothing goes wrong, it will be ours at the end in late August or early September.

The building is located in a residential neighborhood in Covington, Ky., that is off Main Street in a particularly German part area. The building first appeared in city records about 1890 as Jos. Horstmann, a “Dealer in staple and Fancy Groceries, Liquors, Cigars &c.” Two Germans lived above the store at that time – a baker and a stonemason.

The store remained a grocery and saloon for many years – switching to soft drinks during Prohibition – and was a meeting place for organizations such as the Latonia Mutual Aid Society and the Deutscher Pioneer Verein, a German publishing group. By the middle of the 20th century, it was a cafe. In the later part of the century it was a jazz club and, finally, a lesbian bar.

We have no desire to become bartenders, so we will convert the first floor to a storefront with a hand-tool workshop, offices, library and photo studio. The upstairs will be our living quarters. The rear of the building has a small courtyard, plus a two-bay garage for a car and a few machines.

These changes will take place during the next four years as we get our youngest through high school and off to college. So we’ll have plenty of time to do the work and do it right.

Have no fear that this blog is going to become the daily diary of This Old Storefront. While we enjoy fixing up old buildings, I much prefer building furniture and writing about it. But there will be a change of scenery. And I’ll probably sell off a last hoard of surplus tools to help make improvements that I cannot do myself.

And when it’s done, we’ll invite everyone to come see it.

— Christopher Schwarz

For the last two years, Lucy and I have been looking for the right urban storefront for the next stage of our lives, which will begin as soon as our daughter Katy, 14, goes to college.

We’ve looked at dozens of properties in person (hundreds online) and have come close to making an offer on two. I plan to die in the building that we buy – at the bench if I’m lucky – so I’m picky about every detail – light, the architectural core and the neighborhood for starters.

Whenever I teach a class or speak to a club, I get asked several questions: Are you opening a woodworking school? A retail store? A place to film online videos?

The answer is: None of the above.

Lost Art Press, our business, will not change. We are dedicated to making printed books (and the rare DVD) about hand-tool woodworking. We don’t want to start a school or a subscription-based website. Why? We’re passionate about books. Full stop. It’s how we learn woodworking, and we think it is still the best way to transfer the knowledge forward through time.

But this building will fertilize two parts of our business that have been dormant during our first eight years. They involve you, so that’s why I feel compelled to write about them today.

1. A Mechanical Library. Our research begins in the library and ends at the workbench. As such, we have accumulated many hundreds of books on woodworking, many of which have not been digitized. With this new building, we plan to dedicate significant space to our library, which grows every week. It will be a membership library, but the membership won’t cost money. It will be something even more dear. Consider reading about the famous Cincinnati Time Store for details.
2. A Woodworking Laboratory. During the last few years I have taken to collaborating with other woodworkers of all skill levels to work out sticky joinery and design problems. Putting four or six minds to work on a question produces amazing results, and it almost eliminates the idiosyncratic nature of some woodworking teaching. Running an active lab isn’t an effort to make the craft more vanilla or textbook-like. Instead, it is a way of quickly getting past the blind spots of individual researchers and woodworkers. Since I started working collaboratively with other woodworkers, I have found the extra brains lend great clarity to my work.

Today Katy and I looked at a 19th-century property that originally was the Rust Cornice Works, a storefront and factory for making sheet-metal architectural details. The location was perfect. There was plenty of space (more than 10,000 square feet). But the windows faced west. And I’d need to dump at least $150,000 into the building to make it a place to live and work. We have seen better.

The other property on our short list this week looks promising, and it includes a liquor license (no, we’re not opening a bar).

— Christopher Schwarz

A lot of my friends dream about finding a place out in the country that has a few acres of land, a huge barn for a woodworking shop and an abundance of quiet.

Not me. I’ve always loved cities, especially the old sections. I like 19th-century architecture, alleyways and the bustle of city life. I also like being able to walk everywhere I need to go and being in close quarters with restaurants, coffee shops, bars, street vendors, theatres and all the crazy little businesses that crop up in a metropolis. Heck I even like the constant hum.

For the last 15 years, I’ve lived in one of the older suburbs in Cincinnati. Our house was built in 1928, I can walk to the grocery stores, the kids can walk to school and we are less than five minutes from downtown Cincinnati. It’s a nice, leafy suburb. We would be fools to leave.

But I have been plotting the next move for Lost Art Press (and my family) and am eager to leave suburban life forever. Just down the road from us is Covington, Ky., an older city right on the Ohio River and across from downtown Cincinnati.

It has a huge inventory of old residential, commercial and mixed-use properties. And I have started scouting buildings. I want a storefront on the ground floor for my workshop and our publishing activities. And I want to live above the shop. I want a back alley. A loading dock. A tin ceiling.

Lucky for me, Covington is lousy with properties like this. Even luckier: My spouse feels the same way that I do about this crazy plan. Her family owned a drugstore on Madison Avenue until Covington’s economy collapsed and all the stores moved to the suburbs. They lost their drug store. So moving back to Covington to set up business has some emotional appeal.

Last weekend I started looking at some buildings up for sale to get a feel for the market. The first stop: A building on Madison Avenue, one block down from the old drug store.

That property turned out to be wrong in too many ways. But the process – and the view from the sidewalks of the city – felt exactly right.

— Christopher Schwarz