Chandeliers, fireplace mantels, large doorways complete with their original doors, grandfather clocks, bathtubs, stained glass windows and full window frames are all part of the offerings at Hudson Valley House Parts in Newburgh ”” all salvaged pieces of architectural history saved from being thrown away during the processes of remodeling old homes and making them new again.
While Reggie Young, the store”™s owner, knows that not everyone wants such pieces, he can”™t help but occasionally try to convince some people to keep them.
“Sometimes we beg people not to sell us this stuff,” he said. “I say to people, ”˜Please don”™t sell this to me. You should not be getting rid of this.”™ But it”™s the nature of the world, that people want new.”
For those who prefer to outfit their homes with pieces of history, however, Hudson Valley House Parts saves those elements, bringing them to the designers, architects and homeowners who know their worth and how to reconfigure their presence into modern spaces.
It’s nothing like an average antique shop, Young said.
“We specialize in oversized things like 12-foot-tall mansion doors and columns,” he explained. “We have a lot of large-scale stuff, which is very difficult to do because you have to move it, install it, sell it and move it again. It’s difficult to do, but that”™s an aspect that we love.”
Young developed his own taste for vintage pieces and got his start in salvaging and restoring historic architecture in a few ways, including growing up on a farm with parents who worked as restorers.
His own first foray into the field was building a restaurant on Manhattan”™s 42nd Street in 1979, when he was an architecture student at the Pratt Institute.
“I went to United House Wrecking and bought doors to use to make the paneling for the bar ”” that was my introduction to salvage,” Young said.
After years spent similarly designing and building other restaurants, he spent two decades at his restoration company specializing in brownstone and historic mortar restoration.
“We did projects both in the Hudson Valley ”” a ton of projects in Hudson before Hudson really ”˜happened”™ ”” and then up and down the river until the housing crash, at which point we had to go to Brooklyn because there was nothing happening upstate,” Young said. “We specialized in restoration of brownstones, so that”™s kind of my background.”
Back to the Valley
Three years ago, Young decided to use his expertise to start Hudson Valley House Parts, recognizing that options were dwindling in the area for salvaged and restored house parts. During the pandemic he watched similar stores close, including Keystone in the town of Hudson and United House Wrecking in Stamford. According to Young, the latter was one of the oldest and largest salvage businesses in the area.
Newburgh, he thought, was an ideal location for the business, due both to its diverse population and historic architecture and its location.
“I had worked on a building in Newburgh 20 years ago, on a preservation project, and that”™s how I discovered Newburgh,” he recalled. “I really wanted to move to Newburgh for a very long time because of the architecture, which is why people continue to come to Newburgh, actually ”” they”™re drawn to the history and architecture and incredible stock of historic buildings.”
In addition, he said, “Newburgh had a lot of abandoned housing stock, and a lot of buildings are being totally rehabbed.”
Many of the materials also come from historic homes in Connecticut towns like Greenwich, Stamford, Darien and Norwalk, but Young also sources from connections with contractors and pickers all over the country, gaining new ones all the time.
The store has grown through the years with a decidedly local bent, helped along by the recent influx of new residents to the Valley. But the store is also taking steps to reach new customers from all over.
Young spends hours every day sourcing materials from connections in the construction industry, estate sales and other sources, delivering them to some clients who never set foot in the store, but might come across his store by way of its Instagram, which has almost 26,000 followers.
“Covid”™s changed everything because we survive now by selling to people who aren”™t even coming into the brick-and-mortar store,” Young said. “That”™s really how we survived, through Instagram and our website and online sales. Then in terms of people coming into the store, it”™s people from Westchester, from everywhere that we see.”
Young said his clientele fit a few main categories: homeowners working on their own restoration or remodeling projects or just looking to add some pieces; architects and designers looking for specialty pieces for professional home projects; and more niche clients like those in the film industry looking for specific period pieces, or people from across the country looking for unusual, higher-end pieces.
The uptick in filming activity in the Hudson Valley ”” which isn’t showing signs of slowing down anytime soon ”” was a boon to the store during the pandemic, allowing it to score several sales and connections to high-profile projects with items that wouldn’t be a good fit for homeowners and residential projects.
“We carry a lot of period plumbing from all different periods, so recently we”™ve been selling a lot to the show ”˜The White House Plumbers,”™” Young said. “We”™ve done a lot of work with the ”˜Gossip Girl”™ set. During the pandemic they actually bought a lot of stuff from us, which kind of saved us through that period. We”™ve sold stuff for the sets for ‘Mrs. Maisel.'”
At home in Newburgh
Though gaining more high-profile clients over the years, Young’s pride at being a member of the Newburgh community shows through.
He said his work and the store are a way to preserve the history of the Hudson Valley, which he hopes to share with other members of the community and to show the rest of the world what the region has to offer.
Hudson Valley House Parts hosts community educational programming and resources like preservation classes and workshops, which Young reports are attended by people from all over the country, spanning an economically, racially and socially diverse group.
Young himself hosts mortar restoration classes, the next of which will take place on Oct. 30. Other local experts also contribute, like Ben Brandt of Newburgh Sash and Restorations, whose next window restoration workshop will take place Nov. 12 and 13.
Hudson Valley House Parts seems to have gained a firm footing as both a community business and one that brings the treasures of the region to those who appreciate it nationwide. Young himself is very invested in the recent changes and development of the city of Newburgh and the Hudson Valley as a whole, with many new large-scale residential and hotel projects in the works.
“It”™s very interesting to watch all this happening,” Young said, opining that Newburgh in particular offers something different than the trendiness of such towns as Hudson or Beacon.
“(The city) is just too diverse to become one thing,” he said. That”™s what makes it, I think, so interesting to all of us who are here.”
