By DAVID COLKER
TORRANCE, Calif. – Donovan Fell is like an aviation hobbyist who turns vintage airplane parts into coffee tables.
Except it’s not a hobby.
Fell is co-owner of MotoArt, which last year sold $1.5 million worth of furniture fashioned out of items that once flew across the skies. Among them: coffee tables made of landing gear doors, desks fashioned from wing sections and aquariums from deactivated bombs.
None of it comes cheap. It’s hard to find anything in MotoArt’s spacious Torrance shop for less than $1,000, and a conference table can be as much as $35,000.
This is recycling for the wealthy.
“Rich guys come down here, and their eyes light up,” said co-owner Dave Hall, 39. “We envy them, and they envy us.”
“Then we make a little trade,” said Fell, 57.
Although the business took off faster than either salesman Hall or designer Fell imagined when they started it as a sideline in a garage five years ago, it’s their next flight plan that could be the most daunting.
They want to take MotoArt, an artisan business with 13 employees, and turn it into a mass marketer with factories and showrooms around the world.
“We make everything here, right now,” said Fell, standing in their 12,000-square-foot workshop next to Torrance Municipal Airport. “What we need to do is knock ourselves off.”
The showroom area, upstairs from the shop, has been outfitted in aviation-fantasy, bachelor-pad decor.
There are rolling bars that were food carts once pushed by flight attendants. Cleaned up and plated with aluminum for an industrial chic look, they go for $1,500 each.
In a corner is their DC-3 Martini Table ($7,900) with a nearly 5-foot tall propeller mounted on top. Nearby is the Get Bombed Table ($5,400) that incorporates a World War II practice bomb standing on its tail with a hinged nose so that it can be used as an ice bucket.
Hall estimated that 80 percent of MotoArt’s customer base is male.
“Some of them fly into the airport to see us,” he said. “This is like a clubhouse for them.”
Dom Cecere, chief financial officer of homebuilder KB Home, saw a picture in a magazine of a MotoArt table, with a 1930s airplane engine for a base.
“I fell in love with it, bought it and before I knew it, I was buying more,” Cecere said. He outfitted his home office with the table (about $10,000, at current prices), a custom-designed B-25 wing desk ($10,000) and a B-52 crew ejection seat ($4,900) that he uses as a desk chair.
“No one walks into the house,” Cecere said, “and says, ‘I’ve seen that before.’ ”
Fell and Hall met in 2000 at a company that designed signs for Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles’ Union Station and Disneyland.
As a sideline, Fell liked to buy and restore beat-up airplane propellers that once powered prominent military and commercial airplanes. Mounted on bases, they would go for $700 and up at flea markets.
The men struck out on their own as partners in a sign business in 2002, and Fell kept at his propellers. Hall tagged along when he took several to sell at a classic auto auction.
“Dave is a brilliant salesman,” Fell said, “and when he saw the reaction people were having to them, he saw the real dollar value.”
Fell revved up the propeller renovations, working out of Hall’s garage in Rancho Palos Verdes. Within six months, they had enough business to start phasing out the signs and move the renovation operation to a 900-square-foot building. There, Fell added the martini table and other pieces of furniture, which they sold at air shows and other events.
To help meet expenses, they sometimes bartered for services.
They traveled to airplane scrap yards to find parts. A breakthrough came when Fell insisted, over Hall’s objections, on buying a stack of paratrooper exit doors that had been on military C-119s.
Fell made 20 tables of the doors bought for $100 apiece. The first one they sold went for $4,000 and they continually raised the price to see what the market would bear. The last 10 sold for $10,000 each.
Buoyed by word of mouth and articles in upscale magazines, the enterprise grew. Fell’s and Hall’s business struggles were even detailed in an eight-episode reality series, “Wing Nuts,” which first aired in 2004 on the Discovery Channel.
That same year, MotoArt moved into its current building. Several large jobs came their way, including outfitting a reception area and conference room at 19 Entertainment, the company that produces “American Idol.”
They also sold pieces to the Boeing Co. for offices in Seal Beach in Orange County.
“They were buying furniture from us made of parts they originally manufactured,” Hall said.
