Creating a New Niche from the Past

“Kino was born in 1983 (the couple also has an older daughter, Ruby, who’s a nurse in New Zealand) and that’s when I felt a need to start making some real money,” Labe Kopelov says. “I got quite a bit more serious. I went back into construction and became a masonry contractor.”

While the elder Kopelov was making money, he also introduced his son into the business. (“He started at it very early,” says his father.). And, while the company did some stonework – much of it by hand – the two also hunted for old stone-working tools.

Click photo to enlarge“We definitely had an idea of starting our own stone shop, but it was a slow process,” the elder Kopelov says. “For instance, we found an old wire saw, and we started finding old planers. It’s the sorts of things you’d find in Indiana, but not necessarily out here.”

One of his favorites is a planer that came from the Denver Mint and is more than a century old. The two even tried their hands at quarrying some local stone to help out a local brick manufacturer who needed to remove some 60’ of overburden to get to a layer of clay.

“It’s actually a very beautiful stone, and a very hard and durable stone, but it had so many fissures and cracks that there would have been too much waste for the kind of work we wanted to do,” says Kopelov. “We didn’t just want to run it through the splitter and become a flagstone yard.”

However, because of Kino Kopelov’s interest in architectural stone, the direction of the business began to change. By 2000, Kopelov Cut Stone was doing strictly architectural work.

“By the late ‘90s, we were predominantly residential, with a little bit of commercial work.” Labe Kopelov explains. “We’d carve fireplace facades and do entryways for high-end projects – things that could be done with simple saws. Then, gradually, we got bigger equipment and started doing more commercial work.”Click photo to enlarge

Ultimately, the duo bought a boom truck to help site larger pieces of stone and began doing monuments, wall caps and related pieces for commercial projects.

HELP FROM A FRIEND

The Kopelovs might’ve remained the local go-to for architectural stone, save for a friend who thought of them at a critical time in a project some 900 miles distant from Bernalillo.

Labe Kopelov explains he knew Shawn Tibbs of Mill Valley, Calif.-based Restoration Stone when Tibbs lived in New Mexico. Tibbs, with a restoration project of the Chronicle Building in downtown San Francisco for Giampolini-Courtney, a San Francisco contractor, contacted the Kopelovs while trying to match a purplish sandstone from the building’s façade.