Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1540685
D allas entrepreneur Mark Marynick has a track record of rescuing endangered artisan companies. With a heritage-craft portfolio spanning architectural iron- work and ornamental plaster — including Chicago's storied Decorators Supply — he's saving dying arts one workshop at a time. Now he has transformed the original 1928 Mrs. Baird's bakery on Carroll Avenue in East Dallas into a working atelier, its brick The restored Mrs. Baird's bakery on Carroll Avenue serves as command central for his growing guild of revived workshops. In 2017, Marynick and his high-school friend, architect Porter Fuqua, bought Casci, one of the nation's few remaining ornamental-plaster firms. At 33, with an economics degree from Harvard and a fresh MBA from SMU — plus a private-equity day job — Marynick had the toolkit to steer an old-line company. Founded in 1930 by Italian immigrant Giovanni Primo Casci, the shop's fingerprints are all over Dallas, including the great houses of Swiss and Armstrong avenues, Kessler Park, and Lakeside Drive; the Georgian buildings at SMU; churches across the Park Cities; and downtown's historic Magnolia Hotel. Fuqua later stepped away from Casci, but Marynick kept building. In the years that followed, he added more struggling workshops, including Iron Age Studios, a forge for architectural metalwork led by artist Deborah Nesbit. The crown jewel is Decorators Supply — a Chicago institution he bought in 2019 with roots in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. In the decades after the fair, Decorators Supply hired and kept many of the European artisans who had worked there, building a library of historically accurate patterns and designs. Today, some 30,000 master wood molds for moldings, fireplaces, capitals, cornices, brackets, and furniture are preserved in Decorators Supply's Mark Marynick has restored the 97-year-old Mrs. Baird's bakery building as headquarters for the old-world workshops he's revived. By Rebecca Sherman. Photography Pär Bengtsson. Creative direction Michelle Aviña. façade restored, steel-and-glass windows soaring, and two graffiti walls preserved for their artistic punch — a rebirth with the aroma of history. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the 43,700-square-foot former bread factory was designed by George Dahl, the famed architect behind Fair Park's Art Deco landmarks. Its age, condition, and location made it a prime candidate for the wrecking ball, and until Marynick stepped in, Preservation Dallas listed it among the city's most endangered historic places. Today, the script has flipped: Decorative plaster pieces made by Casci artisans. 130