If you ever visited the Austin Chronicle office, you touched the big painted metal doors in front of the reception desk. Well, that is until the former offices of the Elgin-Butler Brick Co. were torn down to make way for the expansion of I-35.
If you’re wondering where those doors went, they’re not rusting in a landfill. They’re leaning against a wall on the ground floor of the Baker Center. But they’re not alone. The room and surrounding hallway are packed with architectural salvage – objects removed from buildings being demolished or remodeled. Whether it’s etched glass doors from the state Capitol, a 1940s bathroom medicine cabinet, or a whole house worth of longleaf pine floorboards, these are items too beautiful, valuable, and usable to be allowed to rot.
The store – available by appointment – is the latest project from Tere O’Connell and her firm, O’Connell Architecture. Their specialty is preservation, and while they have undertaken high-profile projects like the Elisabet Ney Museum, much of their work is in private homes. Now Save the Good Stuff takes that commitment down to individual fixtures and fittings. She said, “The preservation of our historic buildings is our connection to our past. It tells our story. It gives us our unique identity, and I feel very passionate about preserving it.”
The packed Save the Good Stuff is the polar opposite of the O’Connell Architecture offices up on the third floor. Light, airy, expansive, with a gorgeous north view into Hyde Park, it’s the kind of space that can spark inspiration and a love of preservation. After all, the whole Baker Center is proof of the power and possibility of adaptive reuse. O’Connell said, “It would make perfect sense that we would be here.”
O’Connell’s fascination with the former Baker School predates the Baker Center. Back in 2005, she was attending a National Trust for Historic Preservation conference in Portland, Oregon, where she was inspired by preservation projects of the McMenamins brewing company. “They adapt schools to be brewpubs and hotels and theatres, and I was just so inspired by that tour, and I thought, ‘Where can we do it in Austin? We can do it at the Baker.” However, like many people with ideas about what to do with this glorious and underused facility, neighborhood pushback and Austin ISD’s unwillingness to sell off the property meant the plan went nowhere.
So, when the Leagues finally purchased the property in 2019, she was first in line. “We came to the soft opening when it was just about finished, and I was like, ‘Please, Tim, we must be in here.’”
Yet the space of the building also allowed her the possibility of opening an architectural salvage store. “I didn’t want a dusty, bug-ridden place,” O’Connell said. “I wanted it to be nice and clean and dry and in a historic building, and there aren’t many opportunities for that in Austin – and fewer by the day.”
While bland white Modern Farmhouses still sprout on the rubble of older houses, what’s encouraging for O’Connell is that she sees more young homeowners interested in sympathetic remodeling rather than bulldozing. “They really appreciate their historic buildings and want to preserve them.”
This article appears in January 23 • 2026.
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