A lot of New Yorkers have clamored for the furniture Bart Bettencourt and Carlos Salgado make in their Brooklyn factory, yet nobody wanted the raw materials they used.

The pair’s sleek, striped pieces, which have attracted the notice of ABC Carpet & Home, are made from wood scraps from other Brooklyn furniture makers and Steinway & Sons piano factory in Long Island City, Queens.

Recycling wood from the refuse pile brings a green cachet to Scrapile, the Greenpoint business started by the pair, who met a decade ago when both worked at the Guggenheim Museum’s SoHo wood shop. But the eye-catching designs and craftsmanship that mark their work has the business on track to be a success. And free materials sure help the bottom line.

“This project is about local reclamation-based manufacturing,” said Salgado, 39, a Parsons School of Design grad raised in Bogotá, Colombia. When he met Bettencourt, a Trinity College English major with a knack for carpentry, Salgado was an art handler. Bettencourt was on the construction crew.

“We were both blown away at the amount of material that would get thrown away,” said Bettencourt, 34. Read more »

Marcia Wilk has a soft spot for small things — especially small furniture. She has about a dozen pieces spread throughout her Grosse Pointe Park home.

“It’s not dollhouse or child-size it’s in between,” she explains. “It was made by carpenters and woodworkers as a craft to show off their work. It didn’t really serve a purpose, although many people mistakenly think these items were salesmen’s samples.”

Wilk has been collecting the wooden pieces about 20 years. She purchased her first piece — a small icebox — many years ago while living in her native Pennsylvania. Since then, she’s picked up chairs, dressers, desks and other examples. Read more »

Room & Board, a Minneapolis-based furniture retailer offering unique home furnishings that combine classic, simple design and exceptional quality, is making strides toward a more ecologically-responsible future for the home furnishings industry. As a founding member of the Sustainable Furniture Council (SFC), a consortium of furniture manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and non-profits, Room & Board will help set standards to guide sustainable manufacturing and business practices within the industry. While sustainable standards have already been set in myriad other industries ranging from construction to farming, this is the first such effort in home furnishings.

Environmentally conscious initiatives are fundamental to the core objective of Room & Board, which takes pride in socially responsible relationships and traditions throughout the marketplace. Furthermore, Room & Board appreciates another key aspect of sustainability: quality furniture that is timeless in design and built to last for generations, as exemplified by its Linear Series. Popular for more than 20 years and crafted with solid wood and a natural oil-and-wax finish, the Linear series is both durable in the home and ecologically responsible. Read more »

With most of the art world’s high rollers in London this week for predicted record sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, a small auction in New York is calling attention to a group of artists who, some argue, have been unfairly excluded from the market’s gains.

Tomorrow afternoon, Swann Auction Galleries is holding a sale of over 200 works by African-American artists, arranged historically from the late 19th century to the present. The sale, which has an estimated value of $2 million to $3 million, is in all likelihood the first auction at a major auction house entirely devoted to African-American fine art.

“A lot of these artists are sold in galleries or are in museum collections, but at auction, the results are few and spotty,” the director of African-American Fine Art, Nigel Freeman, said. “Some of that is due to a lack of scholarship or information about the works; some is just because they were not heavily exposed during their lifetime.” Read more »

The SFC is an alliance of companies and individuals committed to the advocacy of sustainable business practices in the home furnishings industry, emphasizing the selection of eco-friendly wood choices that is either certified as reclaimed or sourced from managed forests. The alliance is the brainchild of Gerry Cooklin, owner of South Cone, who has long had a passion for the subject reflected in the work of his furniture company and in numerous speeches and public commentary. He has since taken his passion to a broader platform with the creation of the Sustainable Furniture Council (SFC).

The SFC held its first organizing meeting at the 2005 October High Point Market, and met again at High Point in October 2006, extending invitations to a wide variety of interests associated with the home furnishings industry, including manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and the trade press. Response was strong, and the group now counts among its members more than 40 different companies and individuals, including such luminaries as ABC Carpet & Home, Room & Board, and the Rainforest Alliance. Read more »

Meadows Office Furniture Co. helps its clients find the perfect furniture to fit both their spaces and their budgets by offering furnishings from more than 200 product lines.

The New York City-based company has customers nationwide, but earlier this year opened a new office on Main Street in Tannersville to service clients in the Hudson Valley area. That office joins others located in Rochester; Stamford, Conn.; Fair Lawn, N.J.; and Charlotte, N.C.

Amy Slutzky, who works in the Tannersville office, said her job is to help clients find the furniture and furnishings they need while staying within budget. She said there is a wide range of furnishings available at costs for those on budgets or those looking for high end accouterments. Read more »

On any calendar, John Sollo and David Rago’s fall sale of 20th-century arts and furnishings in Lambertville, N.J., is a date worth jotting down for collectors of the contemporary.

But the Modern Weekend set for Oct. 21 and 22 adds an incentive for local buyers that turns worthwhile into obligatory: Among the 1,500 lots are more than 20 of furniture, artwork, sketches and photographs by Wharton Esherick.

According to the catalog notes, the Esherick property comes from York Fisher Jr., whose family bonded with Esherick in the late 1920s after Helene Fischer, York’s grandmother and one of Esherick’s great patrons, introduced him to fellow artist Hannah Weil. Weil ultimately married Fischer’s father. Read more »

It’s one of the most widely heard complaints during the International Home Furnishings Market in High Point: high-priced hotel rooms.

With growing competition from a furniture market in Las Vegas, the High Point International Home Furnishings Market Authority has stepped up efforts during the past year to improve services such as transportation and parking.

On Monday, the group announced the creation of a Triad-based hotel task force to address issues dealing with accommodations during the twice-a-year markets.

“It’s a very good step,” said Chris Adams, general manager of the Ashford Suites in north High Point and a member of the task force. “Our big objective is to open a dialogue between the hotel industry and the market authority.” Read more »

Two catalog sales next week will offer treasures from both sides of the Atlantic: fine English and Continental furniture and decorative art at Freeman’s and fine artwork, predominantly American paintings, at Pook & Pook.

The more than 1,000 lots of English and Continental items will be sold at two Freeman’s sessions Thursday and next Friday, each beginning at 10 a.m. Thursday’s session will open with 348 lots of furniture, some of it coming from prominent U.S. collectors such as Charles Emerson and Pauline Hayworth of High Point, N.C., where Charles Hayworth was active in the furniture business. Read more »