TORRANCE — Donovan Fell is like an aviation hobbyist who turns vintage airplane parts into coffee tables.
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\nExcept it’s not a hobby.<\/p>\n
Fell is co-owner of Moto Art, 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 wings and aquariums from deactivated bombs.<\/p>\n
None of it comes cheap. It’s hard to find anything in Moto Art’s spacious Torrance shop for less than $1,000, and a conference table can cost as much as $35,000.<\/p>\n
This is recycling for the wealthy.<\/p>\n
“Rich guys come down here, and their eyes light up,” said co-owner Dave Hall, 39. “We envy them, and they envy us.”<\/p>\n
“Then we make a little trade,” said Fell, 57.<\/p>\n
Although the business took off faster than either salesman Hall and 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.<\/p>\n
They want to take Moto Art, an artisan business with 13 employees, and turn it into a mass marketer with factories and showrooms around the world.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
The showroom area, upstairs from the shop, has been outfitted in aviation-fantasy, bachelor-pad decor.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 with a hinged nose so that it can be used as an ice bucket.<\/p>\n
Hall estimated that 80 percent of Moto Art’s customer base is male.<\/p>\n
“Some of them fly into the airport to see us,” he said. “This is like a clubhouse for them.”<\/p>\n
Dom Cecere, chief financial officer of homebuilder KB Home, saw a picture in a magazine of a Moto Art table, with a 1930s airplane engine for a base.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“No one walks into the house and says, ‘I’ve seen that before,'” Cecere said.<\/p>\n
Fell and Hall met in 2000 at a company that designed signs for Dodger Stadium, 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 more at flea markets.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
To help meet expenses, they sometimes bartered for services.<\/p>\n
“We had our attorney for four years without paying him a penny,” Fell said, “but he got a lot of our pieces.”<\/p>\n
Buoyed by word of mouth and articles in upscale magazines, the enterprise grew. Fell 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.<\/p>\n
That same year, Moto Art 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.”<\/p>\n
Moto Art’s new direction calls for Fell to ease off from tinkering with vintage parts as the company makes the hoped-for transition into large-scale production. The company is looking to raise $5 million for the expansion, Hall said.<\/p>\n
The new products would contain, in most cases, no vintage parts.<\/p>\n
As an example, he cited a $35,000 conference table he made from a 1920s biplane wing for a mortgage company. Others took notice. “I got a call from a hotel that wanted 300 biplane-wing coffee tables,” Fell said. “I couldn’t find enough wings for that if I lived to be 1,000.”<\/p>\n
He said they could produce the tables out of modern materials made to appear vintage.<\/p>\n
“They would be very reasonable facsimiles,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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