Fortunately our next comission gave us the opportunity to play with the gold leaf. A retired farmer wanted some wheat railings on his balcony for his new house. Being a farmer he was quite specific about his wheat with the number of seed heads and straight stems, we curved the heads randomly to look like they are waving in the wind, hopefully. The gold leafing went well. very time comsuming and fiddly. The wheat heads were forged on the power hammer, it was quite amazing how much concentration they tiik to try and get them all uniform as wheat grows, one miss hit sent the metal off in the wrong direction. Very impressed that the supplier stated that it will probably out last the house!! Andy was really pleased with his corner posts. More importantly the client was really pleased too.

In 1991 my friend, the Philadelphia Classical Architect, Alvin Holm came to me with a proposal to build a 4 ft by 12 ft long balcony for his client, Dr Henry Clay Frick of Alpine, New Jersey. Dr Frick loves birds and also wanted a feeder attached to the railing of the balcony so that he could feed them at his leisure. Dr Frick is the third in his legendary family with the same name since he is the grandson of the original partner of Andrew Carnegie and, with his wife now hosts the celebrated Frick Museum on 5th Avenue in New York City. The house was designed in the Classical Style and the balcony was to be of "wrought iron" using the French Classic Style as a guide. We made a lot of sketches and finally came up with the design that you see installed here. The framework is of 4" standard steel channel, made in pieces, completely assembled in our shop, pre-finished and then dismantled and shipped to the site for installation. The consoles that support the balcony are cast aluminum and weigh about 40 pounds each. The railing is completely made of forged steel elements welded into panels that would be reasonably easy to install. I even made a complete illustrated set of installation instructions in my computer CADD program. Since the TURNER CONSTRUCTION CO. was building the house, we had to allow them to do the installation. It has the bird feeder on the left return rail. The owners loved their new balcony so much that they directed their landscaper to hire me to build a terrace railing to match the balcony. INNOCENTI AND WEIBEL of Long Island, NY was the landscape contractor.

just posting a couple more images of some previous work. i will be posting some images of my new commission tonight it is for a wildlife organization. I have to make an entrance arch using hazel as th