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MAy / J U N E 2 0 1 3 47 Through the course of his life Richard Von Saal has beaten many odds. He fought cancer and the paralysis of his right arm, overcoming other obstacles as well, to be where he is today. Richard is a Renaissance man who takes found, salvaged and repurposed materials and uses them to build art masterpieces. His Von Saal Design Build is an architectural, industrial and interior design company with no shy list of clientele— Andaz Hotel, Caldwell Winery, Jackson Family Vineyards, Lokoya Winery, Revana Winery, Michael Chiarello, Oxbow Market, Staglin Estate Winery and Ghost Horse among others. “I started my company thirteen years ago in a little 150-square-foot studio in a barn on Atlas Peak Road. I had no direction in design—I just knew it was something I wanted to do,” he says. Richard’s studio today is far different: a 7,000-square-foot facility situated in south Napa, with a talented and highly educated team of artisans under his direction. It is stuffed with an eclectic array of vintage pieces and salvaged materials. In addition to the environmental benefits of using salvage and repurposed elements in his pieces, there are artistic reasons as well. “Anything with age has more wisdom,” Richard says, “and that wisdom is present in the patinas of the materials I find.” He selects each piece to create a deeper, richer, symbolic story with the space in which it is placed. He develops a story for the repurposed item and incorporates it into the new space while metaphorically tying the two stories together as one. “I think of a situation and find pieces that symbolize the space.” Believe it or not, part of his reason for using salvaged material is its high quality. “I’ve always been into salvage estate sales and repurposing,” Richard says. “I don’t think they build products as well as they used to in the forties, fifties and sixties. Today they add cheaper materials to steel, and other materials that easily diminish over time.” Even his car is refurbished: he drives a meticulously maintained and buffed 1970 Mercedes-Benz 280SE. For furniture recently created for Cade Winery, Richard teamed up with Shopworks Design Company in building and design. He had creative license to choose the materials. “Shopworks was my mentor,” he says. Richard chose aluminum slabs that were once destined to be cooling elements for a nuclear submarine being built on Mare Island. Richard cut the slabs into shape and hand polished them to a mirrorfinish to create Cade’s eighteen-foot table. “I also like to pair materials that lead to a story about the situation. . . as in a submarine going under water, and a cave going under earth.” Richard also built the seating area in front of Ritual Coffee in the Oxbow Public Market, with every piece of the installation built from salvaged materials he’d gathered over the years. Seats of the booths and banquettes are made from the University of Southern Illinois’ former bleachers. “I found it to be suitable for a marketplace since people of all creeds gather on bleachers to watch a game, like the people who go to the Oxbow Market. They are also of different creeds.” The small green tables are steel salvaged from a steel textile packing plant in South San Francisco. The two round table tops at Oxbow are made from the floors of an eighty-year-old sawmill in Fort Ross. “I find it kind of funny that people there now are ‘eating on the floor,’” he laughs. Asked to describe what inspired his design style, Richard says, “I always marveled at the set designs of Ken Adams, the set designer for James Bond films. I loved that Hollywood glamour: Valley of the Dolls, kooky, chic Hollywood hills.” “My work now is much more refined,” he says. “I see it as sophisticated with a glamour riff. . . very welcoming and decisive.” For current projects, Richard is in the process of creating a new wine tasting room in Sebastopol for a small subsidiary winery of the Hess Collection. He was also chosen to be on the visual creative team for Napa’s first BottleRock music festival. The concert venue will host thousands of guests and top musicians for a four-day concert. With other designers, Richard is in the process of designing and building pieces that will highlight the grounds of BottleRock. You will see his sculptures at entranceways, garden boxes, and riddling racks holding plantings with lights, to name a few. One rendering shows huge guitar sculptures appearing to reach out of the ground and push their way to the sky. He’ll soon be featured on the cover of Mutineer magazine with other personalities of BottleRock. What could possibly be next? Richard laughs. “Fashion...using salvaged fabrics and textiles to create seven dresses with seven armoires!” Nicole Marino is a Napa-based writer, photographer, documentarian and owner of BIGshot in Wine Country. www.bigshotinwinecountry.com and www.facebook.com/bigshotin Above, left: As the resident artist for the Andaz Hotel in downtown Napa, Richard produced a series of similar artworks for the hotel. Among the various materials he used was green steel from the chutes of a textile manufacturing facility in south San Francisco condemned for forty years, and white steel from strips cut out of an old dairy delivery truck. Right, top: A frame from circled cutouts of metal, which will be re-used for table pieces. Right, bottom: Salvaged crystallized sulfur in the plumbing pipes that ran from Calistoga Geyser to Indian Springs. The pipes are pulled out of the ground and replaced every 8-10 years as they become conflagrated with sulfur, much like a clogged artery.


NVLife_MayJune_2013
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