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JUDY STARKAlex Matheson is turning out art-glass knobs for doors and cabinets from his Tierra Verde home and soon will get national exposure on HGTV.
TIERRA VERDE - There's some science, some engineering, some business acumen and some follow-your-bliss in Alex Matheson's story.
A few months ago, after a career manufacturing commercial-grade door hardware in New Hampshire, he decided to move full time into launching a business he operates out of his home on Tierra Verde: producing and distributing art-glass knobs for doors, cabinets and showers.
He took a booth at the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in Orlando last month, the premiere showcase for new products attended by 55,000 professionals: interior designers, builders, distributors, manufacturers. It was expensive, $3,200, "but I knew I had to make the leap of faith," said Matheson, 51, who as president of his one-man company, Out of the Blue Design Studio, runs the business in shorts and boat shoes and a tropical-print shirt.
That leap of faith was rewarded when Joan Kron, host of HGTV's Bed & Bath Design, visited his booth, trailing a camera crew. He expects to appear on her special about the kitchen and bath show, to be broadcast at 9 p.m. June 22.
It's the sort of exposure that little guys like Matheson can only dream of.
"It's my love for glass and my background in manufacturing that helped me develop the line I have now," said Matheson, who blows glass himself and collects art glass. "I love the perfection of the finish of stainless and glass."
He offers about 200 varieties of knobs in three sizes: 2-inch shower-door knobs, 21/4-inch doorknobs and 11/4-inch cabinet knobs. They all come in round, cylindrical or egg shapes. He also offers knobs in stone, and some novelty knobs like the cue balls that might find a home in a game room.
The knobs are made by 25 artists around the country (including two he signed up at the Mainsail Art Festival in St. Petersburg in April), a group he expects will grow to 40 by year's end. Glass artists tend to work alone or in small studios: "Art glass does not lend itself to being a big production item."
Designing the knobs is a collaboration. He familiarizes himself with each artist's look and style, which he asks the artist to incorporate in a particular size, shape and color of knob. "We take a design, we alter it, we tweak it together," he said. He also orders hand-painted knobs from China, where artists use a fine brush to paint designs on the interior of a clear glass knob.
Matheson knows the science as well as the art of hot glass: the chemical salts and oxides that create different colors, the techniques for stretching and handling molten glass. "Every glassblower has a lot of little secrets. Some, they're willing to tell; others, they'll die with them."
The materials to make glass are relatively inexpensive, Matheson says, "but your main expense is energy. It can take three days to get molten glass to a homogenous temperature of 1,800 or 1,900 degrees, to a state where you can use it."
More engineering, science and chemistry come in when the knobs arrive at Matheson's home from the artists. In a well-equipped shop in his garage ("I like to have good tools," he says), he grinds each knob on a diamond wheel to make a flat side where he will attach the shank. He has developed his own assembly-line technique for attaching the shank - 3/16-inch marine-grade stainless steel - to the knob with epoxy.
The hardware is compatible with Baldwin spindles and locks, and the work draws on his 20 years of manufacturing commercial-grade hardware for schools, hospitals and banks. (His company worked on the National Institutes of Health offices in Bethesda, Md., which he says "has half a million doors.")
Matheson grew up on Long Island, N.Y., where his father produced gyrogimbals for the space program and heat shields for the space capsules. When the government wanted to recalibrate the standard inch, it turned to his father to calculate the precise measurement. It was working with his father "that gave me the love for machinery and for engineering," Matheson says.
When Matheson moved to Florida a few years ago, he worked as operations manager for Nautical Structures in Largo, which manufactures cranes and gangplanks, or "passerelles," and other accessories for luxury yachts. These cost from $175,000 to $250,000, and when Matheson saw the lavish interior finish work on the yachts, he began to think there was a market for functional art glass.
The knobs, each one of a kind, are not cheap. A doorknob, depending on the complexity of the work, could cost $300 to $1,000 at retail. Shower knobs are $200 to $400. Cabinet knobs cost $50 to $75. "The quality is good," he said. "I'm fussy about what I put together and the way it looks."
"I've been a frustrated artist all my life," he said. He is a lifelong woodworker (a skill that comes in handy making the wooden display blocks for his knobs), "but I always knew I'd shine best at functional art."
Matheson has spent the first few months - again, drawing on his business experience - putting together a network of distributors and creating a Web site, www.outofthebluedesignstudio.com He is financing the business with an investment of $50,000 of his own money.
"I couldn't have done all this in six months without the Internet," he says: e-mailing information and images, finding suppliers, dealers and artists, and learning about major craft shows, such as the American Craft Council show in Baltimore, where he lined up 15 artists.
Already he is looking to expand the business to custom work. He is talking to Whirlpool about a glass handle for refrigerator doors. He commissioned a Seattle artist to create a 10-inch-long cylindrical glass-door pull for a restaurant. He's working on a glass shelf held in place by two split glass balls. Another new idea, a box of corkscrews topped with colorful art-glass spheres, rests on the workbench.
Now, he's spending his days following up on the contacts he made at the show, improving his Web site, waiting for the exposure and the hits he hopes will come from the HGTV special.
And enjoying the product. "Glass has the perfect finish," Matheson said. "It never fades. It will still be there in a zillion years."