Piecing it Together: Bart Bettencourt and Carlos Salgado

Brooklyn designers Carlos Salgado, 40, and Bart Bettencourt, 35, built their furniture firm, Scrapile, by scavenging for scraps of wood and combining them to make ecofriendly tables. Their first pieces, like the table shown in 2003 by the Brooklyn tastemaker Dave Alhadeff at his store The Future Perfect, were born out of Bettencourt’s and Salgado’s dismay at how much scrap wood they saw being discarded in their jobs as installers at Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum.

“We thought, ‘Maybe we can do something with this,’ ” Salgado says. “We just didn’t want to see this material go into the landfill.” In trash, they saw treasure.

The two are still refining the construction process, which involves fusing different-colored wood chunks to make a solid piece that can then be cut into usable blocks. The resulting tables are simple—one is shaped like a giant staple—but visually animated, thanks to the tan, brown and beige stripes created by the fused wood.

As Scrapile grew, Bettencourt took the idea of reusing materials to the next level: He started a company that would source hard-to-find, environmentally sound products. Although still a partner in Scrapile, he is spending more time on Bettencourt Green Building Supplies, which sells ecofriendly wall, floor and counter coverings made of materials like bamboo and coconut-palm plywood. The clients are mainly designers and architects looking for a green alternative to the Home Depots and Lowe’s of the East Coast.

Salgado, meanwhile, is looking to expand Scrapile’s designs. This year he hopes to introduce chairs, bar stools and, most ambitiously, a series of mutable pieces that he calls “living systems,” composed of modular blocks and shelves that can be reconfigured at will. For instance, by pulling out, shoving in or sliding around various leaves and drawers, a credenza becomes a bookshelf, a TV stand or a desk.

As ecobrands proliferate, Scrapile has to work to continue to stand out, and Salgado plans to push the recycled-paper envelope: “I have a lot of ideas that are going to be a little more aggressive than what we’ve shown in the past.”

"Piecing it Together: Bart Bettencourt and Carlos Salgado" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.