Catskill Cosmos
By Jonathan D. King | Photos by Dion Ogust   Chronogram Magazine April 2005

The spaceship is filled with green aliens waving out the windows to a crowd of grazing metal dinosaurs and animals gathered watch the launch. The miniature hot rods that the aliens must have driven to the site are parked around the yard. Nearby a few smaller ships prepare for take off in the shadows of the Catskills. It is the amazing world of Steve Heller and his Fabulous Furniture located on Route 28 located in Boiceville. And that's just what's out in his yard.

Steve Heller met with me in late in January on a zero degree day after returning from his annual trip to the Los Angles car shows. A compact wiry man with a full head of white hair, a thick beard, and a quick smile, he was trying to adjust to the 90-degree temperature swing from the day before. He told me: "Yeah, I went to a few big-time hot-rod shows. The first weekend was Pomona, West Coast's largest swap meet and car show. Outside in the 80s. Beautiful. And the weekend after was the National Roadster show. That's the granddaddy of all the hot rod shows."

A hot-rodder at heart, like a proud father he shows me pictures of his low riding '59 Cadillac Coupe Deville that shoots flames out of the tailpipe.

Heller restored it himself and like many of his possessions it has a flame paint job. His life long love of hot rods has resulted in lots of flames‹flames on his Caddy, flames on his van, flames on the joiner in his workshop, and many of his sculptures. He recently even painted flames for a customer on a brand new Nissan pickup truck.

As you approach the entrance to Fabulous Furniture, Heller's "greeters" are a five foot metal ostrich and Wrenchasaurus, the legendary Kingston soap box derby champion. An eight-foot pink guitar sculpture fashioned from the seamlessly welded fins and quarter-panels of a '53 Pontiac named 'Stratocruiser' dominates the entryway. Stepping up into the main room, you are confronted by another large bird. Deconstructed from a Harley Davidson Sportster, the five-foot bird is in full stride, with taillight eyes, chrome tailpipe legs, peg feet, and a flame-licked gas tank body.

But with all of the vintage car furniture and futuristic spaceship models and scrap metal creatures, what keeps demanding attention is the wood. This is probably because it is working with wood that gave Heller the successful foundation to construct his retro futuristic world in the heart of the Catskills.

Heller does his own logging, searching for trees both on his own land and throughout the Catskills. Furniture construction begins with tree selection. Of particular interest to him are the diseased trees, especially what is known as spalted maple, the disease's scars leaving marbled grain patterns resembling fine ink drawings. After harvesting the wood, Heller mills it himself on one of his two sawmills located behind the store. His conventional sawmill in his workshop can handle trees up to 19" in diameter. For larger cuts, which Heller is partial to, he uses a custom built chainsaw mill with two engines that takes multiple people to operate for planks up to an astonishing 50" in diameter. Too big for the workshop, it is stored in one of his many tractor trailers nearby.

The next important step is slow drying it in a controlled environment. As he showed me the property we came to a few rusting tractor trailers that he converted into kilns. He opened a door to show me a number of trees that had been cut into Damien Hirst like slices and reassembled with slats between each plank. "All of this stuff is ready to go. It's all in the log. We cut it and then put it back together to dry it. Then we always make our furniture from the same tree so the grain and color always match perfectly." He showed me "the stump room." "We dry our stumps as slowly as possible. And then we throw them in the kiln for another five months, that kills anything still living in them and shows all the cracks we'll have to deal with later." In the shop he showed me a cross-section cut destined to be a table. It was an enormous slab over 2" thick and almost 40" in diameter.

On the other end of the large workshop crowded with industrial machinery, Heller introduced me to his two assistants, Mike Karps and Dan Marshall. Occupying center stage was an unpainted 16' foot spaceship, all gleaming raw metal and primer, with a chrome nose cone and taillights. Her workshop name is Back to the Fuchsia, a referring to the future paint job of the craft. Fabricated from the tailfins and quarter panels of a '56 Dodge Custom Royal, Fuchsia will debut at the Kingston Sculpture Biennial this summer.

We walked around the yard strewn with scrap metal in every direction.

"My fin collection is getting really low," he said shaking his head. "This is all the stuff for the junk sculptures, this is old car parts all over here. Believe it or not, it's all organized," he said laughing. "I really know where everything is." Commenting on his ever growing menagerie of metal monsters crowding his property he said, "I like to make the animals outside because then I can look around and pick and choose parts from the piles of stuff. That way if it doesn't work, like sometimes I get the head on and I change my mind, I chop it off, grab something else, make another head."

Dissecting a wounded life size giraffe destined to be recycled, he went through some of the parts, "That's a '51 Buick grill. This is a '55 Caddy grill here. A couple of old bumpers, a Mercedes [grill], a '65 Buick Riveria, on the back leg, Volkswagen bumper."

Reflecting on his success, he said "I've been here over 32 years and always doing my thing. I never had to go to teaching, I never had to go to kitchen cabinets, I never had to go to firewood." He shook his head, squinting into the sun on a bright and snowy day. "It's pretty amazing, you know." I nod in agreement, but know what is also amazing is his ability to physically construct his vision of the retro-future, filled with flame licked vintage cars, spaceships and dinosaurs, and of course, his fabulous wood furniture. He added with a laugh "Unfortunately, I'm probably going to have to die for this stuff to be worth anything."