There’s a reason customers are once again flocking to El Prado, a home décor shop on Vero’s Ocean Drive.
The birdbaths are back.
For 17 years, the shop has displayed handmade, brightly glazed ceramic birdbaths on the grassy strip out front. Like refreshing oases, the water-filled basins beckon to passersby, who often can’t resist dabbling a finger or two before asking their price.
“The birdbaths are a draw for the store,” says Kent Gustafson, who owns the shop with his wife Becky.
When the Gustafsons bought El Prado back in 2002 (it was three years old then), they gained an existing relationship with the birdbaths’ creator.
Her name was Suzanne Blumenauer, and she lived in Winter Park. When she died in April of this year, the Gustafsons lost not only their friend, but also a faithful supplier of a popular item.
The day soon came when the last birdbath in stock was sold. “We went without anything out front for a couple of months,” Gustafson says.
He began to notice that with the absence of the birdbaths, more people walked by without stopping in.
“There was nothing out there to pique their interest,” he says.
The shop faced a similar problem last year.
One of El Prado’s biggest sellers are the ceramic house number plaques – ceramic numbers and decorative spacer tiles surrounded by a ceramic frame – that customers can mix and match. They’re on a special display stand just inside the shop’s front door.
Kent Gustafson estimates that the shop has sold “well over 1,000” of the plaques.
“If you drive around central beach they are on every other house,” he says. Customers have also ordered plaques for their homes as far north as Canada.
When Delray Beach artist Sharon Kurlychek (who also “came with the shop”) decided to retire from production of the plaques’ components last September, finding a new supplier became a priority.
An exhaustive Internet search did not turn up anything remotely like the unique, all-ceramic product.
Becky Gustafson “kind of freaked out,” says Glenda Taylor, the Vero Beach ceramic artist who responded to the need.
Taylor, a longtime resident artist at Tiger Lily Art Studios and Gallery, credits a former studio mate, Donna Dodderidge, for recommending her to the Gustafsons.
“Becky is my neighbor,” says Dodderidge, who met up with Gustafson on a dog walk in their central beach neighborhood.
“She asked me I knew anyone, and I said, ‘Glenda is the go-to person for ceramics.’”
Earlier this year, when Gustafson was “at a loss” about the birdbaths, Taylor in turn recommended her friend and beachside neighbor, Karen “Keko” Ekonomou, for the job. Ekonomou is a founder and resident artist at Flametree Clay Art Gallery on 14th Avenue in downtown Vero.
“When I saw the birdbaths Suzanne designed, I thought, ‘Oh, boy, that’s right up my alley,’” says Ekonomou.
“Those are my colors, and I knew exactly what she was doing, except for the clay body. And the base, and the poles – I just figured it out.”
When she took over production in May, Ekonomou had to start virtually from scratch, with a fragment from a broken Blumenauer birdbath to guide her.
Ekonomou redesigned the shape of the basin, as well as how to fit it atop its aluminum support pole. (A deep collar on the bottom of the basin slips securely over the pole.)
Before finding just the right shape and decoration for the new birdbaths, Ekonomou made prototypes that she brought to the Gustafsons for review.
“It was a lot of trial and error,” Ekonomou says.
“I would bring one in, and it wasn’t quite right. It didn’t quite look right; it didn’t feel right – none of us was happy with it. It was back to the drawing board.”
After almost four months of creative give-and-take, the redesigned product met everyone’s approval.
The birdbaths sport several lively themes. Ekonomou’s favorite is the one in which her sculpted hermit crabs – bright red with real conch shells on their backs – seem to scuttle around the basins’ wide rims. There are also sun-bathing frogs and baby sea turtles (a Vero Beach favorite), to name a few.
The basins come in two sizes; one big enough for two birds – or one squirrel – to splash in; the smaller one is for birds who bathe solo.
When her finished product hit the market, Ekonomou was swamped.
“I couldn’t get them to the shop fast enough,” she says.
Taylor had to climb a similar learning curve with the house number plaques. Because the plaques’ creator would not sell her molds, Taylor, with the help of her contractor-husband Rick, designed and made molds of her own.
When Becky Gustafson first contacted her about the job, Taylor at first didn’t know how to respond.
“I thought, I’ll check this out, even though I’m not a production potter. I’ve always done one-of-a-kind things,” she says.
Those works range from classically formed vases with décor inspired by the sea, to multiple-piece sculptures of reef life: realistic corals, small fish and other salt-water creatures.
Taylor muses, “I have always had a small production line, with my limited=edition Christmas ornaments and my small framed tiles. So it really wasn’t that far out of my hula-hoop to consider doing something like this.”
Installed in their display stand at El Prado, Taylor’s house number plaques attracted the attention of Linda Jerkins, a writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier this year. Jerkins featured the artist and her plaques in her Sept. 9 “Southern Made” column.
Upon receiving that bit of regional exposure for the product, Taylor approached the Gustafsons about an e-commerce partnership to sell the house plaques and Ekonomou’s birdbaths.
“This is happening right now – the photographer and the web designer are working on it as we speak,” says an enthusiastic Taylor. “We’re going international.”
For today, however, Kent Gustafson is satisfied to have cheery birdbaths in front of the shop again.
Now passersby “look in the window to see what else we’ve got,” he says.
