Carving out a niche in the restoration business: Carl Culbreth, founder & principal, PRESERV.

Carl Culbreth's work as a sculptor creating eight foot long spines, heads and necks out of clay, primed him for work as a preservationist, where he helps reshape the cornices, eaves and facades of eight-story buildings out of Terra Cotta.

"Architecture is basically sculpture you walk into and work in and live in," Culbreth said.

Culbreth happened upon the preservation business around the time he left Parsons School of Design where he was a department head in the winter of 1987.

He was approached by MGM studios to help fabricate brownstone for the San Remo Apartments on Central Park West.

Though balancing on suspension scaffolds 50 ft. in the air did not appeal to him so much, the precise mold making and carving techniques necessary for restoration work did. He worked for various companies learning all aspects of the trade and before, in 1993, he started the firm PRESERV, in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

PRESERV is now owned jointly by Culbreth and current partner, Jeff MacGregor. Employing 12 full-time salaried staff, the firm generally has about 120 people working on a project any given day.

Though the company's reputation is based on their brownstone work, they have restored close to 100 different types of buildings--a large percentage of them landmarked--throughout the tri-state region.

From the restoration of New York's only lighthouse in Fort Washington Park popularized in the 1940's children's book "The Little Red Schoolhouse," to the Winter Garden Theatre in Times Square, their projects have run the gamut of architectural styles.

Though as owner Culbreth's job is more to "throw fuel on the fire or water on the fire, depending on what our needs are," in the administrative department, his eye for art and experience in the trade has given him impeccable sensibilities to choose and orchestrate projects. Hand-picking unique projects in the city where "people are stewards of their old buildings," and old buildings are abundant, is a gift to any restorer working in the field, Culbreth said.

The PRESERV project Culbreth is particularly proud of is the landmarked Park East Synagogue, on East 67th street, which required project managers to draw on a wide range of materials and skills in the PRESERV portfolio--including brick masonry, decorative metal cornice work, leaded glassmaking, and woodwork--to restore the crumbling facade.

The majority of the restoration was completed using the same 19th century hand building techniques as the original builders when the synagogue was created in 1889. Damaged masonry was removed piece by piece using chisels and hammers. The 20 inch circumference of the wooden rose-shaped window was removed and restored using traditional carving tools. The project won the Restoration Award from the Friends of the Upper East Side

Culbreth appreciates the challenges that arise due to amorphous material needs and financial needs of each custom building project. The construction of a lead copper decorative bulkhead on an 1880's townhouse at 20 Gramercy Park required a different approach than restoring the porch on an 1847 Greek-Revival style house in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, or restoring the stone at the US courthouse on One Center Street, but each project had elements that appealed to him.

"I like to see things made and done and built and I have a lot of respect for people who work with their hands and have those skills and can get things done," Culbreth said.

Culbreth loves looking at the buildings PRESERV has refinished and knowing he has "had a hand in restoring it, that I have left my thumbprint in the skyline of New York."

Yet the process of taking things apart and putting things back together, is equally compelling to him.

He likes to examine what is inside the material of the buildings to see what the people viewing the facade cannot see. Shortly after buildings are completed, he likes to watch them age. After they have "gotten a little of New York on them," after the rain and dirt and carbon have seeped into the building's material and stained it, he can determine if he has done his job right.

"I want to see a 130-year-old building that looks like it has been taken care of for the past 130 years," Culbreth said. "If we have restored that building with the construction knowledge we have now and are confident it is going to last another 100 years, then that gives us a really good feeling."

Culbreth no longer pulls his artistic nature from the earth by sculpting clay but roots it there nonetheless through his work as a landscape architect in his backyard in New Jersey. There he builds rock walls for his juniper and terraces for his snapdragons, watching where he needs to cull out weeds that are decaying a plant or perennials in an old bed

He cultivates his garden the same way he does his business, knowing that its needs to change with the seasons, and what worked two years ago won't necessarily work now.

And just as in a garden, he hopes the soil he tilled is enriched for the future. "We spent the past 13 years building up from nothing to what we are now.

"We want to get to the point where we are using our staff and our capabilities to their full capacity," Culbreth said.