Read an Excerpt
Introduction
You never know when a seemingly mundane moment is going to change your life forever. Believe it or not, we can trace the beginning of our adventure to one object, found on the side of a Detroit street.
It’s 2013. We’re biking around the East Riverfront neighborhood, in the shadow of the city’s oddest skyscraper, the Renaissance Center, which looks straight out of a sci-fi movie. A lot of industries used to collide here when the city was at its peak: coal from the south; copper, iron, and lumber from the north; and auto products made right in Detroit. But on that day, the paint on the brick warehouses was chipping, and many of the panes in the milky blue windows were empty. The summer weeds are growing up to our eyeballs.
Even though we’re so close to downtown, we’re pretty much the only ones around. Instead of other people, we’re running into heaps of stuff piled all over the street. Unfortunately, this was a common sight around this time. Detroit was still reeling from the financial crisis, which had hit the city hard. People fell behind on rent or left for somewhere else, and landlords and contractors were responding by throwing the things they didn’t take with them out on the curb.
Not everyone would find much to look at in this picture. But in Detroit, the more you look, the more you see—and what you see is often beautiful.
At some point, Kyle slows his bike. He says something along the lines of, “Whoa whoa whoa—what’s this?” He’s spotted a loveseat, a little worse for wear, but with ornately carved wooden legs and armrests. It’s such an unexpected find among the clothes, bins, and trash bags—an object with a story: the life it had before us, how it got here, and now, how we had found it.
That loveseat—which we turned into a chair that still sits on our porch in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood—became Woodward Throwbacks’ first salvage job.
We’re Bo Shepherd and Kyle Dubay, and we founded our reclaimed furniture and design company, Woodward Throwbacks, to give a new story to the stuff we saw getting thrown away. We don’t pick things up off the street much anymore, though we’ll still pull the truck over if we see something really cool. After more than a decade of making the highest-quality reclaimed furniture and cultivating strong relationships in the city we call home, we’re now privileged to be invited to salvage from some of Detroit’s most remarkable spaces, from nineteenth-century mansions to automotive plants to old schools and churches.
Those aimless bike rides around the city have turned into a thriving business, with a full staff operating out of a 24,000-square-foot former auto dealership we turned into our warehouse, and a bright and shiny storefront in beautiful downtown Detroit. These days, we’re working away on everything from finding and reclaiming special antiques, to building one-of-a-kind furniture from salvaged materials, to designing interiors filled with the texture of objects that have a story.
We’ve learned a lot along the way—about history, creativity, sustainability, thrift, and hard work— and we want to share it with you. Over a decade of building a business, honing our craft, and diving deep into salvage and sustainable design, we’ve come to see our environment with new eyes, and we want this book to change how you see your world, too. This might mean learning how to incorporate a hand-me-down into your home in a way that feels exciting instead of boring. It might mean trusting yourself to buy that weird old couch at the flea market just because you love it, and experimenting with building your space around those quirky antique and salvage finds. Or it might mean seeing that heavy box of tile the previous owner left behind in your new basement as your next homereno project rather than a chore.
As Woodward Throwbacks has grown, we’ve found a community of like-minded Detroit creatives, salvage junkies, and design nerds who have created homes that surprise, challenge, and inspire us. This book will take you on an exclusive tour of these Throwbacks Homes to show you the endless variety, imagination, and beauty that can result when you use antiques and reclaimed materials to make your house into a home. To us, the houses featured here aren’t just remarkable spaces; we’re talking about a way of living. There’s built-in resourcefulness, originality, sustainability, and cost savings in creating your home from what you can find close at hand.
So come on in to these throwbacks homes. We couldn't be happier you're here.
