Apparently, when one door closes, it can close for good.
At least that’s the view of veteran refurbisher Ferdinand Tschinkel, who has been woodgraining doors in Ridgewood, Queens, for more than 30 years. He first learned the technique in Austria and has since adapted the craft to paint hundreds of doors in the neighborhood that he has called home for more than half a century.
Despite being determined to keep at it — for as long as he can walk — Tschinkel is concerned about the lack of successors for his trade. In order to try to drum up some new recruits, another design-minded local operation — the directional design studio KarlssonWilker — has debuted the “Ridgewood jacket.” Developed with Tschinkel, the $455 jacket resembles the veneer that he so carefully creates on area doors.
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As Ridgewood, like Brooklyn before it, is becoming increasingly gentrified, Tschinklel and KarlssonWilker’s founders fear the neighborhood’s signature faux wooden front doors will continue to become scarcer. Well aware that there are no successors for his trade, the mustachioed craftsman and his design studio friends are hosting workshops for anyone who wants to learn the fading art form.
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Aspiring woodgrainers and shoppers can buy the jacket at Kwotus’ online store. Proceeds will be used for the woodgraining workshops at KarlssonWilker. To also help spread the word, a “Ridgewood Doors” pamphlet packed with images of the intricate doors and details about Tschinkel’s made-in-America story are being sold at Topos, a local bookstore.
After World War II, his father was killed and his mother, who was pregnant with Tschinkel at that time, was forced to leave their farm in Germany with his brother. The family relocated to Austria and lived in one of the 59 barracks for displaced people. At 14, he enrolled in a four-year trade school. There he learned to use brimstone to rub the paint into the wood and applied multiple layers of primer and undertones before graining. Next, brushes of varying sizes were used for stippling in order to create a two-tone effect. Applying varnish is the final step in the time-consuming process.
KarlssonWilker’s founders Hjalti Karlsson, Jan Wilker and Vera Yuan, and the tradesman have collaborated with Wilker on one-off jackets in the past. He is now working on a green version of the Ridgewood jacket in homage to what used to be the preferred color of Ridgewood-style doors years ago.
The 23-year-old design operation is immersed in plenty of other projects, including rebranding a brewing company, a brand new travel magazine, designing a line of birdhouses, and working for the National Bank of Iceland. To try to cool things down in the neighborhood during the summer, the studio runs the Ice Cream Window on the weekends for the Ridgewood community. It serves scoops of LadyMooMoo ice cream, sorbets and gelato including Waldmeister, a favorite German flavor that harks back to Ridgewood’s German past.