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Homes

Home decor from a land far away

In an old post office, a couple sell handsome, handcrafted furniture handpicked from the island of Bali.

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published November 18, 2005

TAMPA - Inside an old Art Deco post office along Florida Avenue, just north of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Zac Sperry might soon need his own ZIP code.

Inside his 10,000-square-foot furniture and home goods showroom, Sperry, a world traveler who once lived in a monastery near New Delhi studying transcendental meditation, has carved out an island of sorts for himself.

His sprawling store, the Bali Bay Trading Co., features hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of teak furniture, architectural fittings, garden benches and home decor items from the Indonesian island of Bali, where Sperry owns a second home and a store specializing in Buddhist statuary.

"We have such an eclectic variety of stuff, it's hard to know where to begin," said Carol Pavesi, Sperry's partner in work and love.

Indeed.

One-of-a-kind pieces compete for space - and the spotlight. The selection includes intricately carved chairs, trunks, wardrobes, mirrors, tables, garden benches, chaise lounges and even massive doorways from old Balinese buildings.

The store is a favorite among builders and home renovators from nearby historic neighborhoods and from as far away as Sarasota.

"We draw people from New Tampa, Brandon, South Tampa, even Pasco County," Pavesi said one afternoon last week as she stood surrounded by giant urns, dowry boxes, wooden guardian angels and colorful paintings of fish and tropical flowers. "Most buy one thing and then come back and end up buying several."

Jim Shedden, who owns Pangea Art and Decor in New Port Richey, stopped in to buy display furniture for his shop.

"These are hard-to-find, handcrafted pieces of furniture," he said. "It's hard for me to come here without buying something. I always joke with Carol that it's expensive for me to come see her."

Most customers who walk into the store share a similar reaction: "Their jaws drop," Pavesi said.

The furniture is largely handmade from recycled wood, so no natural resources are depleted in the building process, she said. Several large, 8- and 10-foot doorways and pillars came from buildings in Java.

Sperry, who spends up to eight months a year in Bali, handpicks everything for the store and sends it back via shipping container. He owns a 7,400-square-foot store on Fourth Street in St. Petersburg and another on Bay to Bay Boulevard in South Tampa, which is slowly being consolidated into the Florida Avenue showroom.

Sperry has owned the showroom since the mid 1990s. Originally, he called it Shiva Imports, a wholesale company specializing in everything from sarongs to earthy glass beads to wind chimes.

He started selling goods from Nepal out of his Tampa home more than a decade ago, Pavesi recalled. The business flourished, and soon Sperry became one of the largest U.S. wholesalers of bamboo wind chimes.

"He used to joke around and call himself "the wind chime king,"' Pavesi said.

About three years ago, Sperry began to transform his wholesale business into a retail operation. In addition to the showroom, he owns a 6,000-square-foot warehouse next door.

The selection of Buddhas is extensive, a nod to Sperry's Buddhist faith. In an outdoor garden area, the store offers a wide selection of fountain urns and garden benches, including a selection made from teak root. Organic, sculptural and gnarled as old hands, the seats look as if they were carved from chunks of ocean-weathered driftwood. Shoppers may also browse a collection of large stone "offering altars" that Sperry found in Bali.

"They're part of Zac's personal collection - they're something he really loves," Pavesi said.

At the front of the building at 4222 N Florida Ave., a parasol-toting good luck frog and a collection of colorful rice goddesses, which symbolize fertility and blessing, guard the entrance. Just inside the door, teak Buddhas and a statue of a Hindu god believed to be the remover of obstacles greet shoppers.

"I love to come here, it's like visiting a bazaar," said Digby Betram, an Orlando businessman who bought hand-carved teak Buddhas at the shop last week. "You're getting folk art and authentic artisan furniture at affordable prices. It's really a special place."

Stan and Christiane Adwell decorated much of their Dana Shores house with furnishings from the store. Their decision was based on both the beauty of the furnishings and the fact that the style isn't what is typically seen "in all the model homes," Stan Adwell said. "It's rustic but elegant. It works in both traditional and contemporary homes."

The high quality of the old architectural pieces and the handsome recycled hardwood also played a role in their decision, Adwell said. So did the fact that the store allows customers to try out a piece in their homes first and exchange it if it doesn't work.

But as it turned out, the furniture blended so well in the Adwells' home that they purchased numerous pieces.

"Once we went to Bali Bay," Adwell said, "we kept going back over and over."

[Last modified November 17, 2005, 08:15:09]