Selected Portfolio:
Building Restoration
Architectural Woodworking
Door & Window Reproduction
Fine Art Restoration
Building Restoration
The Old West Church
Adam King participated as lead carpenter for Jan Lewandoski Restoration & Traditional Building’s project to restore the spire of the 1823 Old West Church in Kent’s Corners. The spire was removed, repaired, and placed back on top of the church.
Removal of the church spire.
Repair to post bottom
Reproducing the original 1823 roof from existing remnants.
The spire reinstalled
Architectural Woodworking & Millwork
Alice M. Ward Memorial Library, Canaan Vermont
Arcadia Restorations was given the responsibility of restoring a column from the front porch of the c. 1860s town library in Canaan, Vermont. This column had been heavily damaged at its base, and had suffered to a lesser degree at the capital.
The capital and base of this mid-19th century porch column had rotted beyond repair and needed to be replaced.
The column with its repaired base.
Reproduction Doors and Windows
Many old structures have had their sturdy, reliable, traditional wooden doors and windows discarded. This is largely because they have deteriorated in condition, mainly due to deferred maintenance and a longtime lack of familiarity with their operation and maintenance. Additionally, the building materials industry would have us believe that new vinyl or double-glazed units are more weathertight. They only represent a marginal improvement in terms of the overall thermal performance of a building, and when maintained or restored, and adequately weather-stripped, they can be repaired and maintained for centuries. Arcadia Restorations is capable of constructing historic reproduction doors and windows to match a building’s extant examples, or those appropriate for a particular structure’s time period.
A damaged window unit in an historic barn in Shelburne, used as a template to build reproduction units to replace those previously lost.
The completed reproduction double-hung unit.
A reproduction door.
Artworks
François Stahly - Labyrinth
Adam King, principal of Arcadia Restorations, as part of a small team of preservation carpentry colleagues, participated in Porter & Associates' restoration of a large-scale timber sculpture. The original work was commissioned by The State of New York under the aegis of then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, and was installed in a public square in Albany, New York in the mid-1970s. The sculptor, François Stahly, executed the work out of iroko, which is a hardwood native to much of sub-Saharan Africa, but hardly ever used in North America. The sculpture deteriorated considerably over the course of forty years, and the restoration effort included highly precise CNC-milled repairs, documentation of condition and damage, replacement of damaged wood, non-destructive testing of undermined areas, and employment of conservation-grade resins and adhesives throughout. This project represented a singularly rare opportunity to use traditional timber-frame repair skills alongside cutting-edge technology and art-conservation methods to conduct a successful, sympathetic restoration of a massive art object.
