Written by Rebecca Jenkins
Featuring: Stacia Hummel, Owner of Curio Decorative Painting and Restoration 
Type of business: Grain painting, murals, restoration, decorative finishes, gilding, furniture decoration, stenciling, painted floor, and floor cloths. The period she focuses on is early American to Victorian.
Small businesses form the backbone of the American economy. As we move toward the future, these businesses continue to evolve and make significant contributions to innovation, job creation, and the country’s overall prosperity. While large corporations may receive a significant amount of attention, small business make up 33.3 million businesses in the United States. This is 99.9% of U.S. businesses.
A small business is generally defined as an independent business having fewer than 500 employees. Sixteen percent of all American small businesses have between 1 and 19 employees. Nearly half of all U.S. employes are employed by a small business. More and more, workers are moving toward running their own independent business “their way” and having a better sense of work-life balance and steering away from the pressures and structure of corporate America. Small businesses have added 12.9 million jobs in the past 25 years.
This is the beginning of a series focusing on small businesses in Marietta and Maytown, PA. I encourage everyone to look at local small businesses and seek them out as opposed to shopping at the conventional big box stores. These are the businesses who are first in line to make local donations to the community and support the local area in any way that they can. For example, shopping at a local pet store, and spending your dollar there, means your neighbor can afford to take their child on vacation, perhaps.
The first of my series focuses on Stacia “Staci” Hummel. She is the owner and founder of Curio Decorative Painting and Restoration located in Marietta. Staci is a long-time resident of Marietta, who graduated in 1987 from the Pennsylvania School of Art, which is where the Waldorf School is now located.
Tell us about your business? “I started it in 1988 after I graduated from Pennsylvania School of Art. At that time, I had apprenticed with some conservators and got a studio in what is now the Waldorf building. I started doing painting restoration and frame restoration working on artwork, decorative objects, and anything else that someone would bring to me. I worked for a couple of folk-art collectors, and they would have me do repairs and touchups. I did some work for auctioneers fixing up objects they were going to sell such as furniture and frames. As far as restoration of interiors I did a lot of work for Restore-n-More and got to work on uncovering and replicating historic grain painting and restoration of wallpaper. During that time, I worked on a lot of samples-woodgraining, decorative paint samples on different historic periods of houses. Painting in new houses started to go crazy in the mid to late 1990s so murals, wall finishes, and decorative painting began in those houses. That is what I was doing in the early 2000s. By the mid-2000s, I was ready to go back to historic houses again. I did all the grain painting in McCleary’s. That was a huge grain painting project. They are painted to look like mahogany.
When I first started out apprenticing, I had a vision that I would travel with companies and work on fancy buildings in a bunch of different countries and just travel the rest of my life doing restorations. I did that on a couple of jobs until I didn’t get paid. That was another reason for obtaining my studio and going out on my own. After art school I went to Nantucket for the summer for a program called the preservation institute run by the University of Florida. For 10 weeks I learned about historic preservation from documenting historic buildings, measuring, drawing, researching, and writing reports to have buildings registered on the national book of historic places. I learned how to write up a report to submit to them to have buildings registered as historic places for the National Register of Historic Places. That was the summer after college. Then I did my apprenticeship and by 1990/91 I was painting on my own.
What prompted you to start your own business? “After I graduated, I went to Bulley’s to try to get a waitressing job and they wouldn’t hire me because I didn’t have experience. So, I decided I had to be an artist because I went to art school. I got my stuff together and put some ads in the historic York guidebook of crafts people “The Source Book.” A $5 ad in that book got me my first long term client in Glen Rock. That was in 1989. I did stencil, grain painting, and this technique called grisaille (shades of grey). It is used to create a faux plaster look. It’s a series of shadows and highlights to make it appear as if it’s raised. I did a lot of marbelization in that job.
My family was always encouraging to me to be self-employed as often and as early as possible. My dad spent his life working for someone else and then would come home and do more work. He was probably the person in my life who said to me the most be self-employed, if possible. If I would have gotten the waitressing job and probably end up being a bartender. Another favorite thing is that if I want to take off a week or a month, I can. It’s not like I must ask in advance if I want to be off.”-
How has your business changed over time? I am losing interest in doing restorations. I want to do more gilding and get back to doing more studio work. I would like for them to be picture frame restoration with gilding and gold leafing. I want to get back into painting restoration, but I may have to go back to school because a lot has changed since I did it last. I would like to work on more furniture and learn veneer restorations.
When asked if Staci did any significant local projects, she talked about the Vesta Furnace Building project she did.
“I took samples from the painted wainscoting and looked at them under a microscope to uncover some of the original grain painting layers. Then we chose one of those colorations for the wainscoting and then I got creative with the front door because we did not have any idea of what it looked like originally. I had fun with that.
Overall, Marietta has been a very encouraging and supportive place to start a business in.”
If you could give any advice to someone starting their own business, what would it be?
“Advice for anyone starting in this field: Study, go to museums, go to house museums, look at decorations, learn about different periods of restoration and how they change through time and learn about how fashions have changed. Listen to your clients and do a lot of samples. Pay attention to the needs of your clients. Tune to the needs of your clients. Your job is to help them get your ideas out of their heads and into real life.”
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
“A horse farmer. I still want to be that. I only went to art school because my parents wouldn’t pay for equestrian college. I only lasted a week in commercial art. I changed my major to fine art after that and all the faculty congratulated me. I felt famous for the day. My fine art background is what got me into restoration work. There were a couple of teachers that were involved in painting and architectural restoration so they kind of saw where I wanted to go with that. Everything I did in class was going to become part of my skill set.”
What is your favorite thing about running your own business?
“I help people get their concept better and put their ideas to life. I can guide and influence their project so that it’s something that inspires me, too. Sometimes I would get a mural project and for a long time I could draw anything out and watercolor them in and then I just started to get to a point where I needed to do things to inspire myself and learn techniques. At that point I would go to museums and look at different artists or look at books and investigate artwork so I could incorporate those techniques that I do in murals. On Chestnut Street in Lancaster, I did a house mural of the night sky and to get myself inspired I had to look at others artwork for inspiration. I would tie them together and they would give me direction to go with that mural, so it was different than the other pieces I have done a million times. For kids rooms murals I got to the point where I did not want to paint another bunny or a sky. I looked at a bunch of storybooks from the 1960s with these stencil looking shapes, so I remember doing a couple of kid room murals that tried to imitate those illustration techniques from vintage kid’s books. Some of my other murals were replicas of other early century murals and used their stencil techniques.”