Framework of success

The company”™s new location in Westchester County is not one for the tourism guides ”“ next door to the city dog pound on a vehicle-choked dead-end street of auto repair shops and tow garages in Yonkers. In that hardly picturesque setting, APF Master Framemakers carries on a craft that has earned it a reputation for beauty and quality among the nation”™s art collectors and interior designers, fine art galleries and frame shops, upscale furniture and department stores and major cultural institutions.

“When Jackie (the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) refurbished the White House in ”™61, we were the framers” of the historical paintings she chose to hang there, said David Munn, vice president of customer sales at APF, during a recent tour of the company”™s 80,000-square-foot headquarters and factory-warehouse at 60 Fullerton Ave. in Yonkers. More recently, APF craftsmen framed the painting used on the official White House Christmas card for current residents George and Laura Bush.

“Jackie really helped us a lot,” said Munn, whose father, Morris, and uncle, Abe, with two partners started the framing business in Manhattan around 1953. Munn”™s older brother, Max, is CEO and president of APF Group Inc. “She was a big fan. She helped legitimize us. When it comes to places like the MetropolitanMuseum, that makes a big difference.”

Along with the Met and White House, APF”™s institutional customers include the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. In Greenwich, Conn., the company”™s 5-year-old Michael Thomas Framemakers shop and showroom at 79 E. Putnam Ave. supplies the local Bruce Museum.

“We”™re the biggest, the oldest and still the best at what you could call museum-quality framing,” Munn said.

The company”™s period frames, painstakingly crafted by wood carvers, gold leaf gilders and antique finishers to be indistinguishable from the originals, hold one of American artist Gilbert Stuart”™s renowned portraits of George Washington and French artist Jacques-Louis David”™s outsized “Coronation of Napoleon” that hangs in the Louvre in Paris. For “Les Demoiselles d”™Avignon,” Picasso”™s 1906 painting in the MOMA collection, “We worked over a year to find the molding that Picasso originally designed for it,” Max Munn said.

Even with such illustrious customers, “The heart and soul of our business is supplying the very, very high-end picture frames and molding to all the little frame shops around the country,” David Munn said.

Then too, “We deal with hundreds of the best designers across the country,” Max Munn said. “We have several dozen Fortune 400 people in this country” as private customers.

A.P.F. picture frames can cost “from a couple 100 dollars up to $75,000,” David Munn said. The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla., paid that latter price for a massive period frame for an Annunciation painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Guercino.

A.P.F. Master Framemakers also produces custom-designed mirrors. It recently finished a decorative lobby mirror for the new Wynn Las Vegas casino resort. “Our mirror business has gotten much bigger ”“ high-end mirrors for decorative and residential use,” the CEO said. The company has annual revenue in excess of $15 million, he said.

Seeking larger, more efficient quarters, A.P.F. last spring moved from a 60,000-square-foot, five-story building on Washington Street in Mount Vernon, where it had operated since 1991, to the expansive, single-story Fullerton Avenue site formerly occupied by Loral Corp., the electronics and defense systems supplier. The Yonkers property includes a 20,000-square-foot truck yard. 

The former factory building was “inefficient,” David Munn said. “This is just more modern. It”™s got high ceilings and a lot of light. This has made a world of difference being on one floor.”

The Empire State Development Corp. in August approved an economic development fund grant of $425,000 to assist the company with relocation and expansion costs. The company in exchange has agreed to add 20 employees yearly to its payroll for three years, Max Munn said. A.P.F. currently has about 140 employees. “We expect to spend about $14 million in the next 10 years” to renovate, expand and lease in Yonkers, he said. 

Munn said A.P.F. is hiring mostly local people. “Yonkers is a big enough city that there are lots of craftspersons here,” he said.

The company”™s main showroom is at 219 E. 60th St. in Manhattan. Its one-employee Greenwich showroom has been less successful, Max Munn said. “Showroom business is a difficult business in our industry to replicate,” he said. “We”™ve found it much easier to market over the Internet,” as the company has done for about three years.