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Aircraft furniture or cockpit in the home living room

End-of-life aircraft parts are transformed and given life again in a wide variety of furniture forms. From the sky to our living room.

Airplane is the most fascinating means of transportation ever. Time and time again it is pleasant to watch the take-offs and landings, either experiencing the flights or just daydreaming and sipping coffee by the airport window.

Airplanes also inspire artists and creators who breathe new life into discarded aircraft parts. One of them is a California company Motoart, which makes furniture from vintage aviation equipment. They infuse function, history and a touch of eclecticism into their products. Their work primarily reflects an immense love and passion for everything related to aviation.

Dynamic bar from the hood of the Pratt Whitney aircraft engine that powered the Boeing 747.
Dynamic bar from the hood of the Pratt Whitney aircraft engine that powered the Boeing 747.

If we use aviation jargon, the MotoArt crew consists of two pilots Donovan Fell and Dave Hall, and there are a few more individuals in the entire crew. As is usually the case with success stories, this one also started in a garage eleven years ago, and today Donovan and Dave sell mostly to rich people. "When a rich man sees our products, his eyes light up. We envy them and they envy us. Then we close the deal,” one of the owners once said. Nothing is cheap about Motoart, but it certainly has unique products made from hard-to-find parts that are worth a lot in their own right. It's not cheap to sit at a table made of WWII airplane parts or enjoy a chair that saw the Vietnam War. As they wrote somewhere - Motoart recycles for the rich.

Eighty percent of customers Motoart there are men, and some of them even fly to this part of California to see a workshop that is - in any other way - equipped for aviation poetry. And no one leaves disappointed, because it's hard (or impossible) to say that anything like it has been seen anywhere.

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A few more points of interest:

– They once called Motoart from a hotel and wanted to order three hundred bar tables from airplane wings, but unfortunately they could not accommodate them. "If I lived a thousand years, I wouldn't be able to find enough airplane wings," says Felt.

– Fell made twenty tables out of airplane doors that he bought for $100 each. They sold the first table for $4,000 and then kept raising the price to see how high it would go. The last ten tables were sold for $10,000 (each!)

– A conference table made from biplane wings from the 1920s was valued at US$35,000.

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