At Hyde Park Refinishing, a husband and wife team restores beauty and function to furnishings that might otherwise be overlooked.
By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published July 15, 2005
NORTH HYDE PARK - Chuck and Fonda Carbonell know the value of a day's work.
Times two.
Side by side, the couple blissfully restores, refinishes, repairs and reupholsters furniture from their small shop along Armenia Avenue.
"We love it - we wouldn't have it any other way," Chuck says. "Fonda's definitely my soul mate. You can feel it - our energy is so strong."
You can't miss the barefaced red brick house that headquarters their business, Hyde Park Refinishing. Most days Chuck works out front on a concrete slab, sanding dining tables, Victorian chairs and old wardrobes in the shade of a sheltering oak tree.
On a hot July afternoon, he worked to repair a large nick in a 1940s oak table, taking an occasional break to help his son find a fishing pole or wave to a parade of fans from cops to former employees to friends who cruise past.
"With Chuck, everything is done by hand, everything, every inch," Fonda explains. "If he's got employees helping him, he scours their work. There's no scooting anything through."
Largely self-taught, they pride themselves on making a wrecked piece of furniture useful and beautiful again.
"We've learned everything on our own," Chuck says.
Over the years, the enterprising couple has taught themselves about everything from real estate investment to the antiques business. They've even made an occasional killing on eBay thanks to a keen eye for weird vintage stuff that others pass up (like a box full of 1960s Liddle Kiddle Dolls).
Their Ballast Point home, which they share with four chihuahuas, canaries and an extremely talkative macaw, is filled with collections and memorabilia, from clock and watch collections to old paintings to antique knives.
"We're always into what the other person is into collecting at the moment," Fonda says.
Their dream is a shared one: Buy a laptop and an RV and scour the United States for estate sales, buy up the good stuff and sell it on eBay.
For now, though, practicality calls.
Their real skill lies in making the old seem new - or at least functional.
"We can refinish, strip, repair, paint - anything to do with furniture," she says. "We're a full, turn-key furniture service."
Says Chuck: "It's what we do best. It's what pays the mortgage."
Fonda, who found time to earn a degree in criminology from the University of South Florida while raising their four children (all now grown) handles the upholstering and chair caning, crafts she taught herself by reading and seeking out experts.
"I learned upholstering from an old Spanish woman off of Busch Boulevard who reupholstered car seats," she recalls.
She used to subcontract the upholstery work out, until she realized she could learn to do it just as well and make some money at it. The Carbonells learned to resilver mirrors - another hard-to-find skill - from an old craftsman on Tampa Street. She can also repair all kinds of antique chair caning including natural rush, a type of twisted rope once made from a Costa Rican plant.
"We'll try anything," Fonda says. "We tend to really go at it rather than getting stuck in a rut."
The couple has been investing in rental properties, a skill also honed by reading extensively on the subject. They prefer to buy "fixer-uppers" and do the hard labor themselves. There is nothing they can't do if they put their minds to it: from roofing to refinishing cabinets. The difference between them and other people, they say, is that they just do it - rather than spending their lives noodling whether they should.
"You should see my hold list at the library," Fonda jokes. "We're totally self-taught. We learn either by reading or by taking things apart and putting them together again."
Throughout their 25-year marriage, the couple - now both in their 40s - have worked as business partners most of the time.
They met as teenagers in Palma Ceia, when Fonda remembers seeing Chuck zipping through the neighborhood on his Triumph motorcycle.
Chuck learned furniture refinishing from an antiques dealer who ran a shop across from the Palma Ceia golf course. When he was 16, he walked by and saw an antique French-made chess set in the window and had to have it.
"It was $250, which seemed like a fortune then," he says.
Chuck didn't have the money, but the owner of the shop offered to let him work it off. He managed to do so in a month, but stayed on as an employee for several years learning to refurbish old furniture.
He still has the chess set.
"We figured out the other day that's where my love of refinishing really started," he says.
He initially ignored his calling and worked as a plumber for years, he says, afraid to give up the steady $220 a week income. He eventually quit to join Fonda in their new construction-site cleaning business, a risk that paid off thanks to luck and timing.
"What was really cool was that we were among the first people to launch a business like this," Fonda recalls, "so we could really ask for the fees we wanted. Plus, it was the beginning of the real estate boom, so we had a lot of work."
In the late 1980s, Fonda helped Chuck set up shop in a small house behind Whaley's Market in South Tampa. When development encroached, they moved to their current location, on a double lot they own.
They've been working out of the little red brick house on Armenia for about a decade.
For a while the couple owned an antiques store up the road, called Back in the Day Antiques, a venture that often meant they had to man two businesses. But after a while they missed each other too much.
"I'm lost without her," Chuck says.
If You Go: Hyde Park Refinishing is at 405 N Armenia Ave. (813) 251-0960.
