Using Copper to Accentuate Your House

When lightning struck the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, city hall, it started a fire that burned the dome down to its capstone. Since the building was originally a U.S. Post Office, the original drawings were in the National Archive — a lucky break for Vulcan Supply Corp., which was hired to create the new copper dome. Between the drawings and some 1950s-era photographs, Vulcan had enough information to create a new dome faithful to the original. It took four people working full time for four months to complete the copper work, for a total cost of over $400,000 — and that was in addition to architectural fees, construction fees, and the cost of new lightning protection. Fortunately, insurance covered the cost of the nearly million-dollar project. "Without insurance," says Larry Stearns, "that building would have gotten a plain old roof with architectural tiles." (See photo of the fire.)

When the owners of the McEvoy Ranch, an olive orchard in Petaluma, California, decided to add a pavilion as a gathering place, they knew they wanted something different. The fabulously ornate pagoda they built is certainly that. The copper work alone cost nearly half a million dollars, and that was just a fraction of the work. "It's mind-blowing, just killer," says Larry Stearns of the finished pagoda, which was rumored to have cost in excess of $4 million. "It was great for artisans, even if it's hard for Yankees to get their heads around spending that kind of money." The two copper lizards, a tribute to the skinks that dart about the ranch and adorn the company's logo, measure 20 feet from nose to tail and took 1,200 hours to complete — each. "It wasn't hard to rack up that many hours," says Stearns. "Everybody in the shop was working on it, and it was very labor intensive." In addition to the lizards and the custom-designed copper roof tiles, Vulcan also created 10 five-foot-long fire-breathing copper dragons with hand-blown red glass eyes as lamps for the interior, and another 10 copper hanging lamps for outside. (Read more about the pagoda.)