[Stitcher]

But interesting...

He's a Birdhouse artist

BY MARK HARRINGTON
mark.harrington@newsday.com
August 16, 2007
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment...tory?track=rss

To say that Vincent Giffuni builds birdhouses is a little like saying

Michelangelo painted buildings.

The Wantagh resident's stone-and-mortar bird villas, some with more than a dozen separate-entrance "apartments," are painstaking creations that are as much art as aerial residence. "No two are the same," he says.

A retired lawyer, Giffuni, 78, rediscovered his calling as birdhouse mason when his son Geoffrey happened upon his father's first creation at the home of the elder Giffuni's mother 20 years ago. Vincent Giffuni built the structure for his parents as a joke, of sorts, when he was 15.

"I made them a birdhouse out of stone," Giffuni says, thinking the quirky structure would be laughed at and dismissed. Instead, his father mounted it on a four-by-four post in the backyard, and for years his mother, Artemesia, watched and fed birds that took up residence in the structure.

When the elder Mrs. Giffuni passed away and the family made preparations to sell the West Hempstead house years later, Geoffrey Giffuni discovered the old birdhouse in a patch of rhododendrons and salvaged it for one of his daughters. "I dug it out and asked him to fix it," Geoffrey Giffuni says of his dad. "Then I said, 'I've got three daughters. You've got to make two more.'" So his father got back to work.

Craft skills a family trait

As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, Vincent Giffuni often worked with his father, Louis, an Italian immigrant whose skills as a bricklayer led him to a more ambitious path as a builder.

His father's hard work paved the way for Vincent Giffuni to attend law school and launch a successful legal career at a local firm from which he retired 20 years ago.

Through the years, Vincent Giffuni's skill in working with his hands, as stone mason and sculptor, never left him.

His birdhouse designs grew more elaborate, and whims took him into a range of different styles, from elaborate castles to tightly crafted stone cottages.

Their popularity grew as well. His two sons, Geoffrey and Christopher, and daughter, Stephanie, found the birdhouses had an uncanny ability to draw attention when they were raffled off for charity. They've raised tens of thousands of dollars for causes all around Long Island, including the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Dolan Family Health Center, the Sarah Grace Foundation for Children with Cancer and the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference, says Geoffrey Giffuni.

In all, Vincent Giffuni estimates he has built more than 400 of the structures, for people in this country and as far away as Sweden and Australia. When he's not giving them away for charity or making them for friends and family, he occasionally sells them, charging about $300 for a single-room model. That just about covers material costs and time, Giffuni says, noting they take about four days to complete. Larger, more elaborate models can take up to three weeks.

Giffuni collects all the rocks himself at North Shore beaches, with an eye for specially shaped flat rocks that color up nicely when wet.

After he settles on a design, he constructs them in much the same way a mason would, starting with a cement floor and setting the stones, layer by layer, with levels and squares. He hand cuts each stone with a wet saw, then fits them into the design. "I set them one stone at a time, like brickwork," he says.

A heart-shaped memory

Each birdhouse bears a signature heart-shaped stone above the door and has a stone perch at the entryway. When he lost his wife, Dorothy, to Parkinson's disease a year ago this month, a heartbroken Giffuni moved from the family home in Merrick to a smaller place across the street from his daughter in Wantagh.

The home is both a workshop, which he maintains in the basement, and a museum of sorts for the birdhouses and sculptures he has created over the years. A Gothic chess set he sculpted of intricately welded pieces - Viking warriors and British knights - is his masterpiece. He also keeps a bust he did of the sculptor John Terken, a mentor from East Meadow with whom he once studied, on a shelf in his basement.

But it's the elaborately crafted birdhouses that remain his regular work now, each fitted with that apt symbol of his passion - the lone heart.

HEAVY-DUTY HOMES

Each Vincent Giffuni birdhouse starts with a flat, black-paper base cut to the shape and size of the house to be and set on a piece of 3/4-inch plywood. "Each one of these I work on in my head," he says. "I don't have any sketches or anything. And I work from there."

Four bolts are set down on the paper with double-stick tape before he begins applying cement for the floor. He applies Vasoline to the bolts to prevent cement from sticking, because they will be removed when the work is finished. A 1/4 inch of cement ultimately makes up the foundation. From that base, Giffuni uses levels and squares to lay down the stones, like any mason, starting first with the perch outside the entrance and building up until he reaches the top level.

For the roof, he sets down a border of Styrofoam and builds up layers of colored cement cantilevered to the predetermined pitch. He'll form roof tiles by hand, or level it out with a trowel for a flat slate effect he says works better on the structures. Each "apartment" within a birdhouse has its own chimney (except for castles, which, he notes, don't have chimneys).

All the stonework is given an acid wash when completed, and the entire structure is coated in polyurethane to bring out the stones' color and protect against water seepage.

Finished structures can weigh from 20 to 400 pounds, depending on the number of apartments. Smaller ones are mounted on 4-by-4 wooden posts, but the larger ones require several strong helpers to heft onto steel posts set in concrete.

Giffuni's son Chris has one of the larger ones set near his backyard pool, and all the bird activity can be a distraction.

"People come to swim, and instead of swimming they end up watching the birds," Vincent Giffuni says.