Antique Way

Real Appliances Have Curves

When Janie Wright boils water for tea or bakes a chicken for dinner in her Lake Claire kitchen, she doesn't punch up the digital thermostat on a snazzy stainless steel stove. Rather, she turns the substantial white enamel-and-chrome knobs on her double-wide 1950s Gaffers & Sattler gas range.

When Mary Burke of White invites the gang over for a traditional supper of meat loaf and mashed potatoes, they gather around her 1927 black and white Wedgewood stove, with its six gas burners and four ovens. It sits under a special archway in the center of a vintage-style kitchen "designed around the stove."

Call it the retreat from the Vikings. In an age where the masses are sliding sleek, high-tech, professional-style appliances in between their granite countertops, a small counter culture of folks like Wright and Burke are going soft, simple and sentimental. Not content with vintage-style small appliances, like the KitchenAid stand mixer, these folks want full-size.

"I think the modern stuff is too hard, too cold," said Wright. "I like the plump, old appliances. So when my neighbors offered me an old stove from their house, I jumped at it."

No one tracks sales or restoration of vintage appliances, but it is fair to guess it's only a minute fraction of the 36 million new stoves, ovens, refrigerators and freezers shipped to consumers each year, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers.

But one gauge of the antique appeal is the waiting list at Jowers Antique Appliances in Clayton, where Wright and Burke had their stoves restored recently. The average wait has grown from eight months to 18 months in the last two years, with price tags ranging from $2,500 (for a common brand electric stove) to $29,000 (a rare, nickel-trimmed 1937 Magic Chef 6300 with eight burners and four ovens). Many run between $4,000-$7,000.

John Jowers' father opened the small appliance repair shop in the North Georgia hamlet in 1948 and began selling General Electric appliances in 1952. Jowers joined the business in 1980, and one winter season, when things slowed down because the weekend lake dwellers and leaf peepers were gone, a couple of his repairmen found an old GE refrigerator and decided to paint it candy-apple red.

Jowers placed the relic in the window basically to say "aren't you glad you don't have to use that old thing," he recalled. His phone began to ring off the hook with offers. He sold it, painted a couple of others and for a while the antique business was basically "onesies and twosies." In 1992, he invested $500 in a Web site to advertise restored refrigerators painted in school colors, thinking folks might like them for their lake houses or casual game rooms.

"Pretty quickly, I learned there was a market among folks who were restoring homes and wanted to have appliances that were correct for the period," Jowers said.

The Internet, in fact, is where a lot of antique appliance lovers find each other. Jack Santoro operates an appliance restoration business in California, and he started The Old Appliance Club online (theoldapplianceclub.net). Membership has grown by about 25 percent in the last two years, to more than 6,000.

"It's a way for people to connect. They send in stories of their appliances. They can find parts or find people, like John [Jowers], who can do work for them, or look at our classified ads," Santoro said. "The appeal is that the appliances can be totally functional, and they are classic art."

By 2000, antique appliance restoration accounted for half of Jowers' sales. "But when 9/11 happened, I thought that it was going to go down the tubes. This is a luxury item, not a necessity," Jowers said. "Instead, the opposite occurred. It seemed to create that inner desire for security, warmth and Grandma's old kitchen."

In fact, this year Jowers will phase out the last of the new appliances, which now are crowded into one small corner of his showroom. Competition with large chains and "appliances that are built to be disposed of rather than repaired" make selling new appliances difficult for the main street storefront business these days, he said. But on the antique side of things, Jowers has found a niche. He is one of only a handful nationally who handle restorations.

His showroom is lined with unrestored stoves and refrigerators waiting for buyers to pick them out of the heap and put them in line for restoration behind those that already have sold, like the 1929 Tappan gas stove with a "sold" tag announcing the new owners live in East Charleston, Vt. or the 1938 Frigidaire headed to Lower Burrell, Pa.

He currently has 184 projects in the works. Each piece is completely broken down, cleaned and rewired or modified to bring it up to current safety codes. Some work, like chrome refinishing, has to be shipped off-site. Some appliances Jowers purchased from estates; some owners have shipped appliances in, and a few are restored pieces ready for sale off the floor.

The business has appeared on numerous television shows and will be featured at 10 p.m. Sunday on HGTV's Hey Remember! in an episode about the history of baking. But by far the biggest driver is his Web site (antiqueappliances.com), which gets more than 1 million hits a month.

That's where Michele Reeves of Decatur found Jowers. "I have a small home built in the '30s, and it seemed like the appliances of today were just too big for the kitchen," she said. So Reeves searched online and found Jowers' site. She traveled to Clayton and picked out a 1941 GE refrigerator "that fits perfectly in the space" and a 1950s Roper gas range, with six burners and a double oven.

"A lot of people look at appliance purchases as a yawn, but this was a lot of fun," said Reeves, who waited about a year for her appliances to be ready. "They are just sort of timeless."