#6: The Heritage Company

Now that I have an apartment – roughly twice the size of my current one – that I must outfit, I foresee really missing the Heritage Company. I’m hoping to find a similar outpost in Norfolk, but it’s hard to imagine that any place will be able to capture the unique and musty chutzpah of Kalamazoo’s premier architectural salvage shop.

I could spend – indeed, have spent – hours poking around in the Heritage Company; imagining fixing up this, repurposing that, letting the other just continue to rust gracefully to bits in some corner of my home. I love the chaos in there, seeing old shutters haphazardly propped up on claw-footed bathtubs filled with corroded iron egg baskets, or test tubes rescued from some moldering factory displayed on the shelves dragged out of an old hotel laundry. I love seeing where the 1930’s theater marquee ends up as downtowns all over the place become more gentrified one storefront at a time, love imagining how I might incorporate it into my design if I were, say, opening a restaurant or in need of a new headboard.

I love how just heaping it all up in three dusty, adjacent rooms is at the same time a completely unpretentious and totally reverent act. Everything at the Heritage Company is casually present: you are welcome to rifle through whatever you want, nothing is being promoted. There’s never this hackneyed sense of “our merchandise is very special. We, the civic-minded experts, took the pains to pull it out of someone's basement, so you can pay a premium for it." Nonetheless, everything that is for sale there is heavy with history and intentionality; seldom immaculate, yet most always perfect. There is beauty in each hinge, screw and scrape, and if you can’t see it, then you’re looking at it wrong. This probably explains the dismissive “You want cheap and serviceable? Go to Home Depot” you get from the staff until you become a familiar face.

The prices can be off-putting at first glance, but they seldom stick. I don’t think I’ve ever paid the sticker price for anything at the Heritage Company (except for a Fiesta ware butter dish…the Fiesta ware is non-negotiable). Nor have I ever had to barter. I’d just bring something to the ancient cash register, prepared to pay the asking price, and the guy behind the counter would go, “meh, gimme twenty bucks for it” and that was that.

I love coming home with my new-old light fixture, or ammunition box, or library card-catalog cabinet, and envisioning the semi-local place it came out of. My mom used to say that seeing old, dilapidated houses slowly crumbling made her sad, thinking of what might have become of the families that once scrubbed the floors shiny, of the bride carried over the threshold on the first day of a fresh life, of the children pounding up the staircases. There must have been such snug promise in those houses before they fell into neglect and disrepair. Thanks to the Heritage Company, there is promise in them again. Each time I push aside the three old screen doors that currently corral my wall of closet inserts into something vaguely resembling a closet, I’m glad Idea triumphed over Ikea and that I put those guys back to work. If I have to jiggle the occasional handle, it’s only because I’m speaking the language of that ghost house, one that was maybe two doors down, maybe three blocks up.