Editor’s Note: Repurposed, recycled, up-cycled, salvaged, and chic—it’s remarkable how many restaurants in St. Louis jumped on the fashionable trend of reclamation decorating. What’s good for the environment turns out to be good business for a cadre of architects, designers, and fabricators who transform cast-offs and not-at-all-perfect materials into functional objects, even works of art.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll introduce you to the characters who pull off these magic tricks, but we’ll start with a DIY conversion that relied strictly on the owners’ skills and passions to create a restaurant where 85 percent of the materials, equipment, and furnishings are recycled.
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Matt Schweiss, Bill Cieslinski, and Bill Raible wanted to open a family-friendly bar and restaurant, so they bought the old IGA store built in 1964 at Telegraph Road and Betty Jean Lane. Over time, the unremarkable building had transitioned to offices and to a neighborhood bar, but it had been unoccupied for several years.
The new owners counted 15 holes in the roof. They undertook the extensive renovation themselves, gutting the building to the roof trusses and concrete blocks. Nearly two years later, in spring 2013, Cafe Telegraph opened.
“We had help from our friends,” Schweiss says. “We used professionals when we needed them, but we did most of the work ourselves. We designed it as we built it.”
Schweiss has a passion for fine woods, interesting architectural finds, old signs, and antiques. It’s served him well in the cafe. “Take the cedar wood,” he says. “We’ve got tabletops, picture frames—some of it’s on the walls and posts. An F2 hurricane flattened more than 70 cedar trees on Lake Tishimingo, near where I live. I got paid by the insurance company to clear it out. I hauled it here, where we set up a mill and cut the logs.”
The softly burnished Brazilian tiger hardwood in the bar and entryway spent several weeks underwater in a tractor-trailer during the 2010 Nashville flood. Afterward, a friend in the hardwood-flooring business called Schweiss, who bought the wood as salvage and dried it out for a year and a half in a warehouse. “We weren’t sure it would take the finish evenly,” Schweiss says. “It did. The wood’s got beautiful color. We didn’t stain it, that’s how it finishes.”
When it came time to build the bar, he got a call from a friend about dumpsters full of scrap granite and marble that were headed to the landfill. He turned the odd, small pieces into a mosaic bar top by using a water saw and a chisel.
Three 40-foot sycamore trees from his grandfather’s farm in Perryville provided wood for the bar’s light-blond duckbill edge. “We had that milled at Burkhardt’s,” he says. “The wood was still a little green, and we had to screw it down. We used cedar pegs to cover the screws.”
Schweiss uncovered diamond-shaped windows from the old Arena, which hang throughout the shop. The metal frames were covered in black tar when he picked them out of a tractor-trailer load of salvage. Cleaned and refurbished, they hang throughout the restaurant.
“Don at Rathbone Hardware on South Broadway hand-cut every pane of glass we needed for those,” Schweiss says. “No two shapes were exactly alike.”
Multi-paned doors with wavy glass that partition the bar from the dining room at the entryway came from Re-Store, a construction-materials thrift store that’s run by Habitat for Humanity. Three stunning windows with etched picture glass divide the dining room from the bar.
“A friend found them in his grandfather’s barn—they came out of a tavern in the city,” Schweiss says. “I made the cedar frames. We looked all over until we found that glass—wavy on both sides—to repair them.”
It’s a recycler’s dream, floor to ceiling. “The floor tiles? That’s six different, odd lots of tile. We chose the colors based on the tiger wood. We repurposed the ceiling tiles, too. They even came in the green color, which is great for us.”
The whimsical touches—signs and posters, framed photos and wooden soda cases, snow skis and such—have been rescued and reused. Schweiss even recycled a mammoth Old Hickory Pit 15-rack smoker, which he found on craigslist. The owners use the pit in a shack out back to smoke the restaurant’s signature pork steaks, pulled pork, ribs, and meatloaf. Fish and wings are also smoked and then fried to a crisp later. (For more on the food, read our review from last summer.)
To celebrate a year in business, the three owners added a brick pizza oven. They’re also thinking about building a patio with a roof. No doubt, they’ll search for orphan materials to repurpose, to recycle, and to bring new life.
