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Homes

For the pure love of boats

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published February 4, 2005

New Tampa resident Irwin Schuster was born a child of the sea.

The son of a family of St. Pete Beach shopkeepers, he grew up 50 feet from the Gulf of Mexico.

"I have a picture of myself then, a cute little baby on the beach," he says, pointing to a photo of a chubby-fisted baby with sun in his hair.

By his mid teens, Schuster owned a 14-foot outboard motorboat, and a small "Moth" sailboat. By his 20s, he had swapped his boyhood life on the beach for a career in industrial design.

Over the years, he designed a bilge pump for boats, cross-country ski poles, computer hardware and even packaging for a natural toothpaste.

Work kept him far from Florida.

A few years ago, his three grown children, all settled in the New Tampa and New Port Richey area, lured Schuster, 69, and his wife, Elizabeth, 64, back home. Now a resident of the New Tampa Community, Richmond Place, he's close to water again, if only in spirit.

His exquisite turn-of-the-century model sailing ships fill the rooms of his house. The decorative vessels are displayed with cool reverence, as if they were modern sculptures.

They seem to float through the airy home he and Elizabeth have filled with authentic modern Wassily chairs (designed by 20th century architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer), bright retro Marimekko fabrics, collections of children's blocks, vintage keys, doorknobs and whistles, all displayed with an artist's minimalist touch.

The boats, made from woods like bass, cedar and mahogany, tease the eye at the front door. On the fireplace mantel sits the Breck Marshall, an 18-inch replica of a Cape Cod "Cat" boat circa 1900, with muslin sails and crisp lines. In his studio, an oyster tonging vessel.

In the corner of the living room, a pair of "scooters" or ice sailors, once transportation across the frozen waters of Long Island Sound. In the den, a swanky "Baby Bootlegger" 1920s motorboat, fashioned from mahogany with a miniature wooden couple at the wheel: She wears a flapper bob, he smokes a cigar.

"That's me and Elizabeth," he says with a laugh.

These boats don't come from kits.

Schuster works from scratch using old plans, some from the late Howard Chapelle, a Smithsonian curator, author and researcher of historic vessels.

Others Schuster researched himself.

Let him tell you about the Fundy Slow Schooner, "the truck of the coast," often built by carpenters for hauling goods in the waters around Nova Scotia. Or his replica of the 1885 Puritan, the America's Cup winner.

Model boats have a long history, Schuster says. Vikings took them to their graves. Shipbuilders used them in 1400s England to raise money to build the real vessels.

Typically Schuster's miniature ships take as long to build as a life-size boat, sometimes six to eight months. He works at his old drafting table in his home studio; a bright room decorated with antique toy sailboats, the kind sailed in the pond in New York's Central Park.

Schuster serves as secretary of an exclusive society of miniature ship builders, the Tampa Bay Ship Model Society, who meet monthly at a Lutheran church in St. Petersburg. He even has a Web site, www.merritimemodels.com where he sells his services to boat owners who want a caricature model of their own boats.

Does he sail himself?

"Nope, just a kayak," he says.

He likes to navigate the Hillsborough River, as well as "spits and streams around Florida."

He doesn't need a sail for that.

"I have neither the time or the inclination to sail - I'm just not that into it," he says. "These, the historical boats, are my babies."

[Last modified February 3, 2005, 10:00:09]