Whalen's A Wonder At Wicker

EVERETT - When the wicker chaise lounge arrived at Jan Whalen's door, every one of its half-dozen legs was askew. Its trim dangled dejectedly; its elegant seat was sunken; and the whole thing listed to port.

So Whalen went to work. She screwed in legs, put in braces, replaced ribs and rewove the seat - an intricate and tedious job she likens to "pushing a piece of spaghetti across town."

When she was done, the restored lounge chair was a charming addition to a Seattle magnate's mansion.

Whalen's shop, The Wicker Works, is an intensive-care unit for wicker. Inside a long aluminum building on Casino Road in Everett, she mends wicker that's been used and abused - stored under porches or left out in the rain; shattered on freeways or commandeered for duty as a sawhorse - and sawn clear through.

"We get `em after they've fallen off trucks and been run over by cars," Whalen says cheerfully. Regarding each as a challenge, she often invests 40 or more hours in a single piece.

Such attention to detail puts Whalen's services in demand. When she started her business 19 years ago, she immediately found herself with a six-month backlog. Today, the wait on wicker repairs (she also does upholstering and woodworking) runs 16 months - and she has three employees.

The 80-foot-long aluminum building next to Whalen's home is crammed with wicker in various stages of repair and disrepair. A woodworking shop dominates one corner; a wicker repair shop takes up another. And, up a steep stairway is an attic-like second story filled with the rococo relics of another era, faded wicker antiques lying helter-skelter in the dim light.

Wicker hangs from the ceiling and crowds the floor, leaving only narrow passages through which to maneuver. A battered rocking chair supports a dusty love seat, whose legs jut into the air. Worn, graceful baskets shaped like upturned bonnets balance on tipsy wicker tables and writing desks. Doll-sized baby buggies - minus their hoods - are parked near piles of broken chairs.

The chaotic arrangement doesn't hurt the furniture, Whalen insists. The pieces usually are so battered by the time they get to her that there's little she could do to compound the damage.

Everything upstairs is for sale, though nothing has a price tag on it. Customers, Whalen has found, usually buy the most battered pieces and has Whalen restore them, often bypassing similar pieces in better shape.

She doesn't understand why. "Perhaps it's the mothering instinct," she offers.

That's something Whalen understands. Wicker is not her sole passion. Behind The Wicker Works is a quaint, shingled cottage she crafted herself. Ruffly chintz curtains with tie-backs are at the mullioned windows; calico quilts are on the bed; and soothing, classical music emanates from a radio.

The cottage is a chicken coop, for her dozen or so chickens.

"They're my babies," she coos to the pampered pets. It's her way of counteracting all the cruelty in the world, she said, half-seriously. And the chickens - whose cottage includes a hand-painted clock with Roman numerals - don't mind.

Whalen's passion for wicker manifested late. An art major at Everett Community College, she tried various crafts, fashioning lace-draped porcelain dolls and porcelain salt boxes at one point.

One day, trying to peddle her boxes, she wandered into an antique shop. The proprietress liked her boxes but was more interested in finding someone to repair wicker. Was Whalen interested?

Whalen remembers her answer clearly.

"What's wicker?" she asked.

But Whalen was game. She took home a broken chair to work on, figuring, "It's already broken. I can't hurt it any."

She couldn't find any books on the subject, so she studied the chairs. Her first tools were a hairpin and a pair of pliers. Her shop was a tool shed that doubled as a potting shed. When she wanted to work, she first had to clear her bench of garden tools and seedling starts.

Business grew. After five years, she bulldozed the shed to make way for the current building. She was sure it would be too big - when you're coming from a tool shed, she says, this "sounded like a skating rink."

Whalen attributes her success to treating every job as if it were the only one, and bending over backward to do things right. For the average piece of wicker, that means dunking it in a cold chemical dip to remove old paint, picking the weave with dental tools to remove leftover paint, using a razor to remove rough edges, blowing away debris with a high-pressure air hose and passing a blow torch over it (while brushing it with a whisk broom) to remove fuzzy wisps.

Then come six coats of paint, with a steel-wool rubdown between each coat. The result is a piece as smooth, she says, as "a pet rock."

Not everybody loves the smooth look, however. One customer was distressed to see how polished her refurbished chair looked. She wanted a rustic look. So Whalen obligingly took the refurbished chair back to the shop to rough it up.

"I mean," she says with a shrug, "Whatever it takes to make the customer happy."