Fed up with concrete geese, stone angels and pink flamingos, a certain segment of the home-and-garden statuary market is going gaga over gargoyles.
Medieval European cathedrals, Gothic-style buildings, swell mansions of the rich and famous all have sported gargoyles.
Now, however, gargoyles are heading straight for a back yard or front porch near you.
Sure, some people find gargoyles grotesque, even menacing.
But gargoyle admirers say the fanciful figures are so bizarre, they’re cute. Besides, superstition holds that the uglier the gargoyle, the better it wards off trouble.
“I like the way they look. I guess I’ve got a morbid sense of humor,” says Larry Gietzen, 37, who has 12 gargoyles in his home in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights.
Even though he doesn’t believe the superstition, Gietzen is aware of the tenet that gargoyles repel evil spirits.
“They stand for guarding your house,” says Gietzen, who designs automatic welders for the car industry.
Evoking memories
Gargoyles appear throughout a catalog from Design Toscano Inc., a firm in Arlington Heights that offered its first gargoyle five years ago and now carries 120.
Within 14 days of mailing a recent catalog, the company received 4,000 gargoyle orders–a cool $520,000 worth of gargoyles winging their way to homes all over the country.
“We have letters from 90-year-old ladies saying they remind them of their honeymoon in Paris, or from people who were in the service in World War II,” says spokeswoman Stacey Bueschel McDonald, who keeps a tiny gargoyle hanging over her office computer monitor. “What surprises me is how much people want a part of European history in their home.”
Monette Stach wants to order two more–she already owns one gargoyle–to put on pillars at the end of the driveway at her new home in Huron Township, Mich.
“I know some people look at them and say they are ugly, but they just seem to have an appeal,” Stach says.
Adding personality
Ancient Greeks and Romans used gargoyles as decorative spouts to drain water from roof gutters. During the Middle Ages, gargoyles appeared in Europe on Gothic churches, often as a bird or beast poised on its haunches, neck arching to spit water far from the building.
Technically gutter spouts, gargoyles now include a variety of ornamental beasts, whether functional or decorative, according to Sarah Gravelle, chair of the history department at the University of Detroit Mercy.
“Whoever did them obviously had a wonderful sense of humor,” she says.
Bob Kogelschatz has 45 gargoyles inside and outside his home in St. Clair Shores, Mich. They give his home a warm touch and complement his antiques and Mission-style furniture, he says.
At Eaglestone, a concrete statuary firm in Fraser, Mich., gargoyles are second in sales only to geese, says vice president Gino Vettese. Gargoyles sell to “the younger crowd, to people with big old mansions,” who put them on either side of a drive instead of lions, he says.
In contrast, gargoyles may be seen as adding personality to a nondescript house, suggests Tom Jones, a history professor and former director of the Historical Society of Michigan.
