Paul Block in his studio
From Patricia Corrigan, Next Avenue
Rick Bulan was watching television in 1994 when he saw something he wanted: a 1,000-pound, 12.5-foot-long piece of decaying railing that had been faraway from the enduring Golden Gate Bridge a yr earlier. “I remember thinking it would be a cool headboard for a bed,” recalls Bulan, now 53.
On impulse, he bought the weathered relic. He later purchased additional sections of handrail with the cash he had saved for a down payment on a house and founded Golden Gate Furniture in San Francisco, where he makes lamps, tables, bookends and steel jewelry.
Switch from groceries to furniture
While Paul Block was working as a chef at a winery in California’s famous Napa Valley 27 years ago, he was inspired to remodel discarded wine barrels into tables, chairs, benches and more.
Over time it stopped cooking and opened up Wine barrel furniture in Fairfield, California. In 2012, he began crafting dried vines into candle holders, chandeliers, table frames and kooky fences. Block, now 55, desires to work as a zero-waste manager in a winery.
Over the a long time, each men have made careers of turning something old into something recent, using discarded objects as raw materials for creations which are each artistic and functional. Both took creative risks along the way in which, panned when needed and learned recent skills.
Block designed and built a 6-by-12-foot oven that “cooks” 50 vines at a time to kill any insects or fungi remaining within the leggy vines, a few of that are 8 feet wide. Bulan trained with the flashlights and saws he needed to chop steel, and even took a job in marketing for some time to learn the best way to write a compelling media release.
Both men have been successful – and readily acknowledge that further change is inevitable. But they’re ready. “A lot of people like to talk about what they want other people to do with their lives, but really it just comes down to knowing what you want to do and doing it,” Bulan says. “It’s a little scary, but it’s always worth it.”
“I turned trash into money”
In his opinion, Block’s biggest win is yet to come back. “Essentially, there was no wine barrel furniture before me, and when I die and my furniture lives on, the true value of my handmade goods will be revealed,” he says. “Price times longevity equals value, and many of my pieces will last 100 years. Additionally, my art has had a global impact on the wine industry because I turned trash into money.”
Block has long been committed to finding appropriate ways to reuse discarded items. As a positive arts student majoring in sculpture at Boston University, he was hesitant to buy recent materials. “Making art shouldn’t be stressful, and it was fun to use things I found in landfills or picked up from the trash,” he says.
Block later attended culinary school in Boston after which enrolled at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he studied environmental design.
A profound effect
“When I made a table at Parsons, I used cardboard and other trash,” Block says. “That mentality was reinforced there because the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ had a profound impact on all of us in the art world.”
In 1996, Block moved to California to work as a chef. About 16 months later, he built his first piece of furniture out of a used wine barrel. In 2010, a winemaker invited Block to establish a furniture workshop in a barn on a four-acre property just outside Calistoga, on the northern fringe of Napa Valley.
“He had planned to open a winery with barrel storage, a tasting room and offices, but he didn’t have enough land,” Block says. “I converted part of the property into an agricultural landfill for barrels and vines, and after I put a sign on the highway, wineries brought me their trash because I was able to save them thousands of dollars in landfill fees.”
That earned it recognition from the California Department of Agriculture because the only grapevine recycling company within the state. Block also arrange a community wood bin to gather dried vines that individuals can use as winter fuel.
At the start of 2020, the winemaker decided to sell the Calistoga property. Block moved to a store in the town, then to a shared apartment in Sonoma County and later to a store in Solano County.
“Now I want to implement a public waste management program at a winery,” Block says. “All vines, barrels, bottles, wooden wine boxes, pallets and corks will flow through me, and I will turn them into money. I’ve been doing this since I sold my first piece of furniture, and one thing leads to another with art.”
“Blood, Sweat and Burns”
Like him, Bulan’s metal art has led to just about 30 years of creative satisfaction designed products and cut steel – and invested “blood, sweat and burns”. He explains, “When I use a dry hacksaw, the blade sometimes throws hot little pieces of steel in all directions, so I’ve gotten burned a few times.” Still, the Bay Area native notes that his early learning process was even harder.
“After renting a truck to bring the first large section home and moving it to my side yard, I spent a month figuring out how to cut it,” says Bulan. A ironmongery shop advised him about saw blades for a circular saw and his neighbor taught him the best way to cut steel with an oxy-acetylene torch. Bulan used the torch to make a 115-pound bedhead as an alternative of one which weighed 350 kilos.
When a friend asked Bulan to make him a headboard, Bulan put aside his finance degree and quit a warehouse job so he could give attention to a profession that had apparently chosen him.
“I never thought about where it would lead,” he says. “I just knew it was what I wanted to do and I pursued it.” Over the years, Bulan mastered tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding and a plasma cutter and learned the art of taking out magazine ads.
Currently, Bulan is fulfilling custom orders and designing recent products, “playing with different arrangements and shapes” to match the steel of the bridge. The pedestrian handrails he first purchased were faraway from the west side of the bridge, which is exposed to high winds and salty air from the Pacific Ocean.
“The sections were not in bad condition,” he notes. That’s since the base coat for the bridge, which opened in May 1937 after greater than 4 years of construction, is a zinc primer and the highest coat is a moisture-curing acrylic battleship enamel paint within the eye-catching color International Orange.
Since the bridge sections replaced lately haven’t been made available to Bulan or other interested buyers, he sees an end in sight. What happens if he runs out of steel? Bulan laughs at the proper setup and quips, “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”
