In the late 1990s, the town of Easthampton, Mass., built a new municipal facility for its police and fire departments and put its handsome 1885 firehouse up for auction. Only one bid met the minimum. It was made not by a real estate speculator, but by marquetry expert Silas Kopf, who was looking for a shop. When he realized he’d just bought the building, with its footprint of 2,400 sq. ft. and its 65-ft.-tall tower, Kopf came down with a severe case of buyer’s remorse. But once he converted the first floor, with its 13-ft. ceilings, to a workshop, glassing in the garage bays and adding heavily insulated stud walls inside the brick ones, that bid seemed brilliant. Upstairs, where the firefighters’ living quarters and offices were, Kopf created rental apartments, doing much of the carpentry himself on weekends. As for the tower, it wasn’t built for a bell, but for hanging canvas firehoses to dry before they were rolled up for storage.

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