Just a few hundred yards from the center of Grand Rapids and within earshot of the bustle on Fulton Street, a cobblestone driveway winds up a hill to the massive front door of Guarneri House and tunes the mind to a different tempo.
It’s a bit spooky at first, standing at the foot of the large Victorian home at 221 John St. NE. As the massive front door opens, one sees a stunning population of stringed instruments lounging from room to room inside, arranged as if the scores of violas and cellos and basses might start playing themselves.
“It’s nice to have a grand old building to show violins in,” says Steven Reiley, who owns the property that serves double duty as his workshop and residence. “You step back in time when you’re making stringed instruments.”
Time-honored tradition
The label on the small downtown business comes from the 17th and 18th centuries, when the Guarneri family of Italian luthiers -- craftsmen who make or repair stringed instruments -- created violins in competition with the more renowned Stradivaris.
For the past 35 years, Reiley, 60, has been crafting his own name as an award-winning master bass and bow maker. It is a career he has fashioned through repetition, birthed in a kitchen oven. More than 1,000 bows and 40 basses later, the survival of Guarneri House suggests the ancient craft can sustain the modern artisan.
“Now, there’s a lot of people getting into it because, basically, they see you can make a living at it,” Reiley says in his basement workshop. “I do it pretty much the way all the great makers of the past made bows (and instruments). The old hand tools are the best.”
Reiley had wanted to become a homebuilder, following his father’s footsteps in the construction business. But he was urged into music, and in the early 1970s was studying stringed instruments at the University of Michigan and hanging out in a friend’s Ann Arbor violin shop. Strapped for cash, Reiley tried his hand at bow making in the trailer where he resided with his wife, Paula.
“He carved it and heated it and bent it all in my kitchen,” says Paula, now manager of Guarneri House. “He heated it in my oven. I wasn’t too pleased.”
Soon, Reiley was renting space in his friend’s place, using shop tools to make bows. He remembers cracking the wood when trying to bend it into shape, and having trouble putting the bow’s hair in place.
“It was kind of like reinventing the wheel all over again, learning to make these bows,” Reiley recalled. “We didn’t have any money so I thought, ‘Well, I may as well try to make one.’ I was just going through getting my degrees and creating a little extra money on the side.”
A bow to bows
That first bow sold and, in Paula’s words, “it all kind of snowballed from there.” After a couple years of teaching, Reiley decided he liked building things better.
“He was a musician. I guess I was fine with that,” Paula remembers about her husband’s return to heart. “My father, on the other hand, was like ‘You’re going to support my daughter doing what?’”
Reiley’s basement workshop is far from glamorous, as symphonic music from a portable radio carries the only air of the high culture implied by his trade. A cluttered desk sits amid an assortment of old-fashioned tools and dusty hunks of wood. Reiley compares a finished bow with Siberian horsehair to a design sketched on paper, then moves around the room explaining the process.
A plank of pernambuco, a dense wood from Brazil prized by bow makers, gets cut into the basic shape of a bow. Reiley then planes the piece by hand to get the right thickness, tapering it just the right amount from one end to the other. And there is an alcohol lamp he uses to heat the wood, enabling Reiley to fine-tune the bow’s shape by bending it over his knee.
“It’ll take several times through to get the desired thickness and the proper camber,” he says. “Each piece of wood has its own strengths and weaknesses. You have to get to know that piece of wood."
Finding the sound
“I try to make them as beautiful as I can," Reiley says. "But the most important thing is how they play. I got to be such a fine player that I knew exactly what I was looking for in a bow.”
An accomplished bassist, Reiley in the 1970s played in the Grand Rapids Symphony and moved here from Ann Arbor because of that. He aspired to play in one of the country’s major orchestras, and in 1981 toured with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to famed venues including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Then, he stopped playing.
“That was kind of a mini-capsule for me of a great career performing in a great orchestra,” Reiley says.
During that time, Reiley honed his ear for the equipment and sold some of his bows to visiting artists including Yo-Yo Ma and Mstislav Rostropovich. That gave his fledgling business a start and, now, he counts among his clientele players in symphonies from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to Berlin.
“The list just goes on and on of those great concert artists who bought my bows and performed on them,” Reiley says. “I’ve got basses in all the orchestras I couldn’t get into as a player and my bows are being performed on by musicians from all over the world.
“For me, each instrument or bow I make is a performance.”
Reiley was working at the Christian Music Center, which is now Meyer Music, when in 1978 he partnered with fellow musician Philip Greenberg to start what would become known as Guarneri House. Greenberg, who went on to direct what is now the West Michigan Symphony in Muskegon and, later, the Savannah Symphony Orchestra, left the business in 1990. The business started across from The Pantlind Hotel, what is now Amway Grand Plaza, before eventually finding 221 John St. in 1980 and taking on the Guarneri House name.
A growing household
Not long after, Steve McCann found Guarneri House and has worked with Reiley repairing and restoring stringed instruments for the past 23 years. In the room next to Reiley’s basement workshop, McCann surveys the top of a damaged violin.
“Somebody dropped something on it,” he says. “There were multiple cracks and it was sort of smashed in.”
No problem for McCann. A woodworking student in college, he got a violin in pieces and found that he so much enjoyed putting it back together that he went on to apprentice at a large shop in Chicago before coming to Guarneri House. In addition to restoring instruments like, say, an old cello with worm damage, McCann also has built about 35 cellos, violins and violas.
“They each have their own rewards and difficulties,” he says, comparing the two tasks. “I enjoy the challenges. They’re all different. It’s something different every day.”
McCann’s handcrafted violas and violins are listed for $15,000. Reiley’s bass violins are priced at $20,000-$25,000 and his bows for $3,500. Guarneri House also has instrument designs made in China and finished here that sell for $5,500 to $12,000.
One of three Reiley children, Aaron, works in the business selling basses for $15,000 to $20,000 - he’s now working on his sixth instrument - and handling rentals of Chinese-made instruments. Guarneri House also sells student-level instruments and, often by consignment, older, pricier instruments made by well-known luthiers of the past.
“As you can see, we have instruments everywhere,” Paula says, giving a tour of the main floor.
In one room, with pictures of instruments hung on a wall decorated with a musical score, a safe locks some of the house’s most prized items. In another, bass violins stand aligned in three rows as if ready to march. The Reileys, grandparents of 10 set to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary later this month, make a point to have family gatherings elsewhere. There’s just not room in the old house now filled with about 75 basses and an assortment of smaller instruments, along with the couple’s black Labrador, Buddy.
With a cigarette in his fingers, looking over a 1741 bass violin he’s restoring, Reiley ponders what’s become of his career and whether he wished he were building new homes instead of maintaining a centuries-old tradition in Guarneri House.
“Not in this market,” he laughs. “In the end, I think it turned out just fine.”
Matt Vande Bunte writes about business, government, religion and other things. His work has appeared in newspapers including The Grand Rapids Press and Chicago Tribune and in assorted sectors of cyberspace.
Photos:Steven Reiley assembles a bow at his workstation -Photo courtesy of
Eric Jon
Violins in showcase
Andrew Reiley shows a bass in progress
Instruments inventory at Guarneri House
Steve McCann violin workshop master
Photographs by
Brian Kelly -All Rights Reserved