DeLand salvage shop gives new life to parts of old buildings
Orlando Sentinel
3/14/2023
© Willie J. Allen Jr./Orlando Sentinel/TNS
Sconces and light fixtures are just a few of the thousands of items in the Florida Victorian Architectural Salvage store in DeLand, Fla., Thursday, March 9, 2023.
DELAND — Mark Shuttleworth has spent decades racing against bulldozers around Central Florida.
Shuttleworth salvages old homes or businesses facing demolition or going through renovations, primarily buildings constructed from 1880 through 1940. Most are within 150 miles of DeLand.
His downtown DeLand shop, Florida Victorian Architectural Salvage, is full of the results.
There is wood flooring, hundreds of wood doors, arched transom windows and light fixtures. Outside, shoppers can find cast iron clawfoot bathtubs as well as some statues. The shop also carries some reproductions.
Customers buy the salvaged goods for their own restorations or to add some historic touches to new homes or other projects.
“We’re definitely the Lowe’s for the older houses,” said general manager Danny Sorensen. “People come to us for restoration efforts .... things that are definitely not common things you would find at Lowe’s or Ace Hardware or anything like that.”
© Willie J. Allen Jr./Orlando Sentinel/TNS
Florida Victorian Architectural Salvage has hundreds of antique doors in DeLand, Fla., Thursday, March 9, 2023. Florida Victorian Architectural Salvage in DeLand has been salvaging building parts from demolished and old Central Florida buildings since the 1980s.
Recently, Shuttleworth’s crew, along with volunteers, salvaged 7,500 bricks from the 1920s Hotel Putnam in DeLand. It was torn down in February.
Those bricks, cleaned and with an added plaque featuring the hotel’s image, are being sold by the West Volusia Historical Society for $50 in a fundraiser to help restore two other historic DeLand buildings.
Shuttleworth said Monday more than 115 bricks had already been sold, and once those sales are finished the remaining bricks will go to the MainStreet DeLand Association to be used for repairs on old downtown buildings.
© Willie J. Allen Jr./Orlando Sentinel/TNS
Florida Victorian Architectural Salvage owner Mark Shuttleworth, pulls out a piece of antique lumber housed in a shop in DeLand, Fla., Thursday, March 9, 2023.
Shuttleworth, now 74, started his business more than four decades ago. At the time, he was an administrator of a job training program and adjunct professor at what was then Daytona Beach Community College.
He and his wife had purchased an 1895 farmhouse in nearby Lake Helen, where he would eventually serve as mayor and still lives today. He got the chance from a friend to salvage items from an old mansion for his home.
“He said, ‘You can have anything in the house you want for $250, but I got to tell you the bulldozers are coming at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning,’” Shuttleworth said. “I wrote him a check. I stayed up all night. The bulldozers didn’t come the next day. They came a day after that, so I just kept working.”
© Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/TNS
The historic Hotel Putnam in downtown DeLand is demolished, on Monday, February 13, 2023.
After taking out an advertisement in the Orlando Sentinel to sell some of the extra items, Shuttleworth quit his job and started his business in 1981 in a Sanford citrus packing warehouse. He moved the business to DeLand in 1989.
“It was just thrilling,” he said. “I was 32. It was raw capitalism.”
Florida Victorian normally pays a fee to go through buildings ahead of demolition, usually between $500 to $2,000, Shuttleworth said. Sometimes people just give things to the business so that the items are recycled.
“Every deal is a little different,” he said. “More typically, we’ll have a couple of weeks and so you have to be really careful what you get involved in. Typically, the flooring, the antique flooring, heart pine is worth salvaging, certainly.”
© Willie J. Allen Jr./Orlando Sentinel/TNS
A customer walks through the Florida Victorian Architectural Salvage main show room filled with thousands of antique items in DeLand, Fla., Thursday, March 9, 2023.
In 2013, Florida Victorian salvaged Orlando homes from the 1910s and 1920s before they were torn down in an expansion of Lake Eola Park.
Florida Victorian sometimes purchases items that it didn’t salvage, such as pieces it got from Church Street Station.
The DeLand store itself is 8,000 square feet, and Shuttleworth said he also has another 7,000-square-foot warehouse and “various barns and storage sheds, several places around town I have stuff stored.”
He has five employees but sometimes brings on more people for help with big projects.
Customers might be looking to do their own work on older homes, but not always.
“Originally, we had a lot of restoration, people doing solely restoration, but with the advent of HGTV and Chip and Joanna [Gaines of the ‘Fixer Upper’ show], and things like that, people are doing accent pieces, or adding older pieces to their newer builds or newer homes to create a little bit more of an organic feel,” Sorensen said.
Take Susan Ellis, a 73-year-old New Smyrna Beach resident who incorporated a fireplace, stair railings and other pieces from Florida Victorian into her house built in 2019.
Ellis’ purchases included cyprus French doors for her pantry that she liked so much they inspired other custom-made parts of her new home.
“The trim on the French doors was so beautiful I told my builder I wanted the trim on all my doors to look like that,” Ellis said.
Shuttleworth said those doors came from a home in DeLand his business salvaged that he estimated dated back to the late 1910s.
“I wanted my house to look like it had been there forever,” Ellis said.
Buying from Florida Victorian was important to Ellis.
“People today buy cheap stuff. Everything is cheap, and these things that I’ve bought will last way after I’m gone,” Ellis said. “He’s giving new life to these things.”
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