3,000 Antique Doors (and Counting)

Tom Joyal loves old stuff. And at his shop, it?s on display for your perusing pleasure.

(Photograph by Scott Dorrance) Tom Joyal

At the Old House Parts Company in Kennebunk, Maine, employee Mike Thompson is scraping loose paint off of two circa-1910 porch balusters with a stiff wire brush and rubbing them down with Butcher's wax. The customer who bought the shafts intends to use them as the legs for an 1887 white enamel bathroom sink purchased earlier at the shop. "I think it's a way to let loose for people - old stuff," says 41-year-old owner Tom Joyal (pictured below). "Let loose because it's imperfect. It's already been through the ages and the wear and the tear. It's already lived."

This do-it-yourselfer's home improvement paradise, housed in a rustic two-story, 11,500-square-foot 1872 freight warehouse beside operating railroad tracks, is jammed to the rafters with American architectural salvage, largely from 1730 to 1930. All of it is authentic; none of it was mass-produced. (Though Joyal recently began carrying some 1960s items with retro appeal, like Bakelite and Formica collectibles, due to customer demand.) Says 30-year-old Thompson: "A lot of the customers are new-construction people who just want to put cool, funky stuff in their homes that you can't buy at Home Depot."

Old House Parts is best known for its selection of more than 3,000 antique doors (exterior and interior, bathroom and barn, French and Victorian, to name a few) - all standing upright like books on a shelf. The obsessively organized inventory also includes roughly 2,000 window sashes, about 1,000 stained-glass windows, more than 500 fireplace mantels, as well as hundreds of newel posts, shutters, and decorative floor and wall grates. In addition, Joyal estimates that he stocks approximately 14,000 square feet of vintage wooden boards that may find a second life as flooring, wainscoting, or door and window trim, plus 2,500 square feet of bead board. "Basically, it's an antique lumberyard," he says.

In the corner behind the register, sorted alphabetically in steel file cabinet drawers and custom-made wooden bins, are more than a million pieces of distinctive aged hardware - cabinet latches, doorknobs, keyhole covers, mortise locks, sash lifts, and skeleton keys, among them. Outside, weather-proof plumbing supplies, such as Carrera-marble sinks and porcelain claw-foot tubs, are lined up on the platform like commuters waiting for a train.

A greater appreciation of old houses and more people wanting to restore them - along with the save-the-planet movement - have sparked the growing interest in architectural salvage, particularly in the last five years, says Rich Ellis, publisher of Architectural Salvage News, a trade paper in Rocky Mount, Virginia. Such salvage, he notes, can be reused in creative ways: "You can take an old iron gate and hang it on a wall in a new house, and it becomes a piece of artwork."

Conserving the earth's resources is important to Joyal, the father of two, who has a long brown ponytail and iPhone earpiece often dangling from his right ear. He zips around town in an electric truck. In 2002, the salvage dealer built a 36-foot-long wood-paneled houseboat (his "cottage") from a hodgepodge of reclaimed materials; he keeps it docked in the Kennebunk River, 2 miles east of his shop. A former contractor, Joyal does about 30 percent of the buying for Old House Parts firsthand; the other 70 percent of his eclectic inventory comes from East Coast "pickers," people who regularly scour auctions, flea markets, yard sales, and the like for treasures they can resell.

Architectural salvage - generally, property from the 1940s or earlier - is prized for its superior quality and craftsmanship and priced similarly to antiques. One of the oldest items for sale at Old House Parts is a 1750s hand-forged wrought-iron Suffolk thumb latch ($150). One of the rarest pieces - among Joyal's top five all-time best finds - is an ornately carved Federalist mantelpiece with reeding, of unknown provenance ($9,500). More typical stock like exterior doors starts at $250, while popular hardware pieces like porcelain doorknobs sell for about $25.

Many of the 10,000 visitors each year come to gawk, not shop, regarding the Old House Parts Company as they might a history museum, one with constantly changing artifact exhibitions. For those who do buy, the reason is often pure nostalgia.

"Let's face it, most people don't have their family home to go back to," Joyal says. "So they come and they want that farmhouse sink now. Or they want a piece of stained glass like they used to see in their grandmother's house."

Stacey Chase, a freelance writer in Maine, contributes frequently to the Globe Magazine. E-mail her at storychaser@earthlink.net.