By Kelsey Abbott

Posted: 11.09.09

For most people, an office renovation is a chance to start anew—new desks, new tables, new walls. Chris Erickson thinks differently. When he set out to renovate his Portland, Oregon office he used a whole bunch of old stuff—old desks, old tables, even old walls.

The Office

Chris owns Parliament Design, the small but stellar design firm responsible for several awesome websites, print displays and animated films, including RecycleBank's own award-winning video, The Cycle.

Chris has always had a knack for repurposing rejected objects. In high school, he made a reclining bike using an old Lazy Boy chair he found in an alley and the components from his sister's then-current bicycle. The chair was a hit with his friends, but not so much with his sister.

Brooklyn Streets Work Table

Years later, Chris is a designer who still "dig(s) finding new ways of doing old things." That's abundantly clear in the re-design of Parliament's office where Chris boasts, "not a single piece of new wood or lumber was used; everything was reclaimed."

For the guts of the re-design, the Parliament crew searched for local materials. They crafted 11 desks using wood from an early 20th century Portland church that had recently been demolished.

Production Studio

For a work table, they used wood from a 1930s barn in Sherwood, Oregon and an old pizza oven they found in the basement of a restaurant supply store. They built the cupboards and countertops in their new kitchenette using more than 600 pieces of wood from a 1904 Oregonian barn. Using more wood from that same barn, they gave some walls an old-fashioned look by laying thin strips of wood side-by-side. For an outdoorsy feel, they repurposed eight cords of wood from their local grocery store to create log walls.

Kitchenette

After exhausting their local sources, the Parliament crew took their search for "cool old stuff" to a place known for lucky bargains and cut-throat bidding wars. That's right—eBay. Among other things, they bought old crates, old bottle openers and Brooklyn street signs. They tore the crates apart and reassembled them as cupboard doors and then attached the vintage bottle openers as doorknobs. To add a little pizzazz to the work table in the Production Studio, they turned the Brooklyn street signs into drawer faces.

Just goes to show that old really can be new again.