Note from Suzanne: This story originally ran Nov. 6 - check the company's website for upcoming restoration workshops:
As a kid, Tad Fallon liked to follow his father around antique auctions in upstate New York. In fact, his family started up an auction house for furniture and collectibles, Copake Auctions, Inc. It was only natural for Fallon to go into the family business.
Fallon’s insatiable quest to figure out the ultimate way to fix a cherished piece of furniture, right down to the molecular makeup of old finishes, has led him to the high end of what is often considered a home-schooled craft.
Fallon, an Old Lyme resident, is partner of Fallon & Wilkinson Furniture Conservators, LLC, based in Baltic. He and his partner, Randy Wilkinson, who lives in Baltic, recently expanded the business to a new facility. They are preparing for a public open house on Friday, Nov. 21, from 3 to 9 p.m.
The business specializes in furniture restoration, conservation, and building of fine furniture reproductions. Its clients range from The Frick Collection in New York, the Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites, and the White House to local establishments including the Florence Griswold Museum, the Fehrer House in Lyme, and the New London County Historical Society, as well as corporate and private collections and high-end dealers such as Sotheby’s and Colefax & Fowler in the United Kingdom.
“We do many different things, and we do them all pretty well,” said Fallon, who studied furniture restoration at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Restoration program in New York City. This balance is not only good for business, it makes for interesting assignments and challenges.
There is a broad range of pieces and value as collectibles, monetarily and otherwise, that world-class furniture restorers will work on, Fallon said. His business does traditional gilding with gold and silver and works with delicate wood veneers, restoring intricate designs and historic finishes. “The reality of the marketplace is that I will fix your grandmother’s broken chair,” he said.
The bread and butter of their work is a lot of good quality furniture, new and old, that needs to be fixed. In Connecticut, that can include quite historic pieces.
It’s only been from the 1980s that furniture restoration has moved from the craft tradition of a home-schooled approach to a scientifically trained, graduate level program in the U.S., Fallon said. Meanwhile the conservation profession had already established itself, years before, for paintings, sculpture, and ancient artifacts. But when $12 million furniture pieces started showing up at Christies and other high-end auction houses in the late 1970s, things started happening.
The Smithsonian Institution started adapting scientific techniques to the study of furniture, analyzing coatings, using microscopic high-tech analysis, and using cleaning solutions that are high-tech, Fallon said. It also commissioned a four-year graduate Furniture Conservation Training Program for furniture conservators. The first class graduated in the mid-1980s.
Fresh out of FIT, Fallon landed a dream job at Sotheby’s Restoration as a supervisor in the Polishing Department. He willingly left that position, though, to win one of the coveted seats at the Smithsonian. Getting in there required completing what amounted to a pre-med student’s regimen of college chemistry courses. Fallon headed back home to college and opened his own restoration company in Copake, N.Y.
Fallon started the program in 1996, and found a kindred spirit in Wilkinson. A graduate in Electrical Engineering at the University of New Haven, he decided to follow his dream by opening a business building 18th- and 19th-century reproduction furniture. Requests by clients to repair their antiques led him to the Smithsonian program.
In 2000, Fallon and Wilkinson were two of the five members of the last graduating class of the Smithsonian Institution program, which has since ended. Both men also completed master’s degrees in Conservation from Antioch University.
Fallon met and married his wife, Jen, whose family is from Guilford. Jen worked in the world of Internet banking, and Fallon was an adjunct professorship at FIT.
“Randy lived in Baltic and had this big old barn,” Fallon said. “Jen and I lived in this little studio in Manhattan, and we’d come up and do the shoreline thing.”
Months before 9/11 occurred, the Fallons both had the chance to make career changes, and they decided to head to the Connecticut shoreline. After a condo in Branford, they moved to Old Lyme and became home owners. They now have two sons, Liam, 4, and Davis, 1 year old.
Fallon admits he and Wilkinson are the rarity among the Smithsonian alumni, choosing to go start up a business. But this has strategically positioned them to be the qualified private contractor to work with museums and collections.
“If you look at the museum profession now, every institution of any note in the country—Winterthur, the Met, the Frick Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, the Getty in LA—somebody there came from our program,” he said. Others are in high-level private or corporate collections.
“It’s very insular, word-of-mouth,” Fallon admitted.
When the White House needed to make an exact replica of its eagle podium so the original could be sent to the Reagan Presidential Library, John Courtney, head of conservation and fellow Smithsonian graduate, suggested they bid on it. Wilkinson built that replica with painstaking detail. Before his piece was finished, there was a side-by-side comparison with the original in the White House. Then Fallon spent a week in Washington, applying the gilding.
The newest member of the business team, Rian Deurenberg, was born and raised in the Netherlands. She trained for four years at the furniture conservation program at the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN) in Amsterdam and completed internships at the Amsterdams Historisch Museum and at Bruys Meubelrestauratie, a private firm.
She moved to the U.S. in 2002 for a postgraduate fellowship in Brooklyn and went on to Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“Rian is extraordinarily talented, and at 28 years old she is renowned in the museum world,” he said. One of her articles on rare Finlay chairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a recent cover article in the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works.
“Furniture is like the red-headed step child of the art conservation world,” Fallon said. “We are a serious profession, but not often does a wooden artifacts person get the cover of that prestigious, peer-reviewed journal.”
Wilkinson and Deurenberg also recently were married.
Fallon frequently lectures and writes about conservation. He was a participant in the 2001 “Furniture in France” study tour, sponsored by the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. All three business partners are active in the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and its various committees.
The business also has expanded to offer workshops; the first one, on antique furniture restoration, will be held Nov. 15 and 16. Classes in 2009 will focus on gilding restoration, building a veneer box, and faux restoration.
Fallon & Wilkinson is at 32 Bushnell Hollow Road, Baltic. Call 860-822-6790 or see www.fallonwilkinson.com for more information.