It's located on Kyiv's artsy Andreyevsky Spusk street: a house of history preserved together with all its furnishings. "First it was my hobby. None of my relatives was interested in restoration, but I always liked old things," says owner and master craftsman Valentin Reyunov.
Armchairs, shelves and tables from the 17th and 18th centuries fill the rooms of his domestic workshop. "Old things personify a continuous link between the past and the present. This means the passing along of heritage after everything bad and meaningless has gone away, and the best and most essential is kept for us," he explains.
His hands are old but sturdy and distinguished, like the household items he repairs and renews. "I find the neglectful attitude toward old things offensive ... my eyes have seen many an antique in disrepair, and my mind still runs over their images like an old cinema reel, one by one. But I quickly realized my goal in life: to buy and try to restore these relics. In fact, the life of a human being is desperately short, but the things I have restored will live centuries after us."
The young painter
Valentine wasn't always a furniture restorer. Now well into his seventies, he started off as a student of oil painting in his native Kyiv, at the Institute of Fine Arts. Between the institute and his home stood a second-hand shop. "One day while coming home, I saw a pair of old worn chairs made of red wood in the window of this shop. After a lengthy negotiation of the price,
I bought them for five rubles. My family was shocked, but I noticed how the space of the room I put them in changed immediately," he recalls.
Armed with the most rudimentary of tools and an artist's touch, Valentine set to restoring them to their original beauty and design. "It really is a miracle to see the furniture of past centuries right in front of you, to watch it glisten with amber lacquer just tempting you to touch it?"
The old craftsman soon made acquaintances with others who shared his passion: restorers, buyers and sellers. "People often ask how I can distinguish the cheap and fake from real antiques? And I answer: the same way a common person distinguishes a horse from a cow."
Although Valentine has no formal education as an art restorer, he has been doing it for decades, often relying on photos of originals to guide his hand.
As for where he finds his treasures, each one has its own story: "This fireplace was found on a rubbish heap ... this lamp was bought in Vienna - look! It's made of real gold!," he says with excitement.
Sometimes the seemingly most insignificant of items gets the most attention and work: "Here is a door knob. We worked on it for four months: casting, minting and putting in the stone." Valentine believes that he must put as much labor and care into his restoration as the original craftsman did. And he instills this kind of dedication into his apprentice, Dmytro.
Master and apprentice
"Many young people came to me, but only he had the necessary values ...," says Valentin about his apprentice. But Dmytro's motivation had little to do with art. "I came here 10 years ago with no interest in antiques. I simply needed to feed my family, and Valentin started to teach me. First we worked together scraping the paint off a simple door. Later he taught me some more difficult things. Being young I couldn't stand sitting in one
place. I used to be impatient and tried many professions: fitter, driver, vendor ... but after meeting Valentin Reyunov I got interested in restoration, and my working relationship with my boss grew into a friendship," the apprentice recalls.
Dmytro is now so attached to his work that he takes pictures of items he has restored to remember them after they have been sold. As for Valentine, he still retains something of his first vocation in his attitude toward his current profession: "See those chairs? The first antiques that I purchased later appeared in my paintings, in the backgrounds of portraits I did ... they come back to me all the time," says Valentine.
Among his colleagues and friends, Valentine is known as Mr. Baroque, as much for the period he works with as for his own personal style. In fact everything about his workshop-home, with its smell of lacquer and creaky spiral staircase, testifies to the fact that there are no sharp divisions between time and space in his life.
Living with art
"You can't divide art and you can't divide the artist," he says, quoting the 20th century Ukrainian painter Marc Chagall: "the most important thing is quality." Valentine not only lives for his work, he lives with, on and around it. Every visitor to his shop can smell fresh flowers set in magnificent 18th century vases standing on dark mahogany tables, beneath portraits he painted himself. The atmosphere is modern baroque, like Valentine.
And his desire to preserve and restore things goes well beyond furniture. The 19th century building where he lives and labors was once condemned to be demolished. "It was the year 1986, and many of the older buildings were being barbarically destroyed. The destruction plan had already been confirmed by the local soviet authorities, and the intention was to build a huge, convenient parking lot for lorries that transported food to a nearby factory called Yunost (or Youth in English)."
So Valentine and other members of the local intelligentsia rallied to save the aging edifice, which had originally been built as a jeweler's shop. "We did the same to rescue other old buildings," he says, "the reason is simple: the love for a small thing turned into the love of big things. Now I can truly say that I have fallen in love with this building."
But Valentine has still not forgotten his first love. One of his lifelong dreams is still to paint the perfect picture, which will survive to one day be restored again.
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