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Modern weather vanes with an L.A. twist

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Here’s a traditional architectural detail for modern times: the weather vane.

John Bissell, a Los Angeles lighting designer and former head of production for Rezek, was in the coastal Northern California community of Sea Ranch when he and his wife noticed that a lot of weather vanes didn’t float their boat. Bissell recalled with fondness the weather vane that perched on the roof of his grandparents’ home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. -- ‘a Shenandoah Clipper ship,’ he says -- but contemporary choices ‘were all sort of three dimensional and didn’t have the charm I remembered.’

He was without a job at the time, since Artemide had relocated its Rezek division to the East Coast. His wife, Debra, a design industry veteran and partner in Bissell & Wilhite Co., had closed the flatware company. So she suggested, ‘Why don’t we make weather vanes?’ And the idea took hold.

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The couple’s new endeavor is American Architectural Weathervane Co., and it calls on local metal fabricators whom John previously used to produce contemporary lighting here in Los Angeles. ‘The welder I worked with for years is doing our manufacturing,’ he says. ‘We can make one of the weather vanes from scratch in less than two weeks.’

Each of about 20 two-dimensional silhouettes are made of laser-cut, 14-gauge steel with a black powder-coat finish. Every pug, whale, owl, ship, lighthouse or rooster sits atop a perky arrow and bold north, south, east and west directional arms made of stainless steel with solid brass fittings. One of John’s favorites is a folk art horse, right, whose shape takes inspiration from a Mexican piggy bank. A cat-and-bird silhouette tops the red tile roof of the couple’s Spanish bungalow.

The silhouettes are about 20 inches tall and 23 inches wide; the arrows are about 34 inches. Price: $175, plus an additional charge for hardware specific to roof pitch.

Says John: ‘It’s nice to go back to the old days when weather vanes were seen as folky and artful.’

-- Debra Prinzing

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