Frank Di Piazza
More than 100 years after King Camp Gillette became a millionaire selling safety razors to lazy Americans, it looks as if disposable culture is finally ebbing away. And artist Cole Scego can build you a set of chairs, a table, a bed, a wall panel, a backsplash, a light fixture or a door that will last for a very, very long time. How long? "A couple hundred years," Mr. Scego says matter-of-factly.
Constructed from steel or aluminum and finished with powder-coat finishes, his furniture is as indestructible as anything manufactured by the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the Cold War, though the aesthetic is Eamesian. His most popular table is stenciled with tree branches, with the word "bird" nestled in them; celebrity blogger Perez Hilton ordered one ("We did bright pink for him, and it bleeds through so incredibly bad, so we had to do like 100 coats of paint," Mr. Scego notes with some amusement). His version of a Queen Anne table sports flat metal legs cut to mimic the silhouette of turned wooden ones; the tabletop reads: "Did Queen Anne hide her cabriole legs beneath a dress?" A dining room table, made from a single sheet of bent aluminum, is filigreed with swirly flowers and birds with legs like bendy straws. From across the room, it looks as if the figures are etched into the metal.
"This is actually powder-coat, applied dry," Mr. Scego explains. "So a bare aluminum piece would be grounded and then given a positive charge, and then you shoot a big charge through a gun," which makes the powder stick electromagnetically. It can then be messed with before it's baked in an enormous oven and sealed on forever — or at least until it's melted down and reused.
Orders come through local word-of-mouth or publicity from blogs like TreeHugger and Boing Boing: "Our business pretty much comes from Missouri and overseas." That includes a Greek shipping magnate, who ordered a steel coffee table, even though it cost as much to ship as to build.
"This was actually for a local guy," Mr. Scego says of a hulking black chair that's the incarnation of the word solid. Decorated with zooming yellow lines, it's so glossy and black, it looks lacquered. As for its bulk: "This guy has all this ironwork in his house, and a wine cellar, and he wanted it to be hand-hammered. I'm like — 'What!? Hand-hammered!' So I went ahead and also hammered out some sort of butt cheeks there in the seat," Mr. Scego chuckles. His next project will be more delicate: hacking an old putty-colored manual typewriter, still in its case. "We're going to take it all apart, powder-coat it and put it back together," Mr. Scego says. And this one won't be going to Greece: "It's for one of our friends, who likes to write poems."
Cole Scego Design, 636-221-2524, colescegodesign.com
