BY RACHAEL BUCKINGHAM

 

In Bob Hines’ shop, mirrors are everywhere, piled high on the floor and hanging from the walls. The floors creak. The air is heavy with the afternoon sun shining through the dust. What seems to be a showroom is really a workshop. Long tables are piled with scrap mirrors, paper and tools.

      “I never really meant for this place to be a store,” says Hines. “People are always walking in thinking this is an antique shop, but my prices are too high for the normal passerby.” On any given day Hines can be found tucked away in his office. Even when a passerby comes in, Hines may not emerge from his office. “They aren’t going to buy anything,” he declares, “so I don’t even bother.”

     Hines is the owner of R Squared, a mirror and glass shop he started more than 30 years ago, when he moved here from Austin, Texas. He was fortunate enough to have set up shop right after Hurricane Hugo. The city was rebuilding, which gave Hines an in. “It was so crazy,” he recalls. “The hurricane damaged so much, but it really got my business going.”

     At the time Hines and his small team were only working with stained glass, mostly for houses in the South of Broad area. But stained glass was becoming an art of the past. He wasn’t getting enough commissions. He needed to expand his scope. Finally, at flea markets and antique shops he discovered the art of mirrors. That would be his next big thing, he decided. He started by finding old mirrors wherever he could.

     “One time I picked up an old mirror off the side of the road,” he recalls. ”That was exciting.” Then he would make frames for them. His creations were selling well until customers started asking for custom mirrors.  This meant that Hines needed to make the mirrors as well as the frames.

     To do so, Hines worked with a group of college graduates who had majored in glass arts. With their help he came up with a technique to make new mirrors look old. He also figured out how to make customized mirrors.

     Hines’s work can be found all over town. His stained glass creations fill many residential windows South of Broad and such restaurants as Halls, McCrady’s, The Ordinary, FIG and Mercato. But, in the 30-plus years that he has been in this industry, there is one commission that stands out, he says.

     In 2010, he was commissioned by Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim (KKBE), the second oldest synagogue in the United States, to help solve a problem. In the Jewish faith, people aren’t supposed to turn their backs on the Torah, so it’s a tradition that synagogues close the doors to the ark that encloses the Torah. The doors to KKBE’s ark, however, were too heavy to open and close at every service, so the synagogue leaders decided to leave them open. This worked until KKBE’s rabbi left the synagogue, and no other rabbi wanted to take over, because the rule had been broken for so many years.

     The synagogue hired Hines and his team to fix the problem. After two months of work, they replaced the heavy doors with stained glass. “It was one of the more rewarding commissions I had done,” says Hines. “Definitely the high point of my career.” A member of the synagogue who was present the day the doors were revealed to the congregation recalls, “There were many happy Jews that day.”

     Hines has built a life of making new things look old. He finds happiness behind patinas and lead glass. His business has grown to a team of six and a second workshop on Meeting Street. He knows his years are numbered with the shop on Upper King Street as the area begins to develop, but he says, “even late into my 80s I want to be that old man that still works on stained glass.”