Ben's Automotive Decor's new space offers a coffee shop and car creations in Atascadero 

When cars reach the end of their road, one artist in Atascadero gives their parts a second life.

Ben Harvey turns his passion for cars into art by outsourcing parts, cleaning them up, and crafting them into decorative pieces through Ben's Automotive Décor on El Camino Real.

"We deck out showrooms or people have car caves where they keep their car collections," Harvey said. "As our main business, we build coffee tables out of car engines, and couches out of cars, and lamps. We also do a lot of smaller gift items, too, like little desk clocks made out of pistons, and beer openers."

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• Photos Courtesy Of Ben Harvey
• BENTLEY BLUE Ben Harvey looks for custom parts that match his customers' wishes, like this Bentley W12 engine that he polished and turned into a coffee table.

Community members and car enthusiasts can now walk into Ben's Automotive Decor's new location, which celebrated its grand opening on Aug. 2. Harvey said the space has a showroom and a coffee shop where people can come in to browse what's on display, grab a cup of joe, and watch some racing. Harvey also does custom orders with custom car parts.

Cars were a staple of his childhood in Devon—a town in Southwest England that Harvey said reminds him of the Central Coast, with its pretty beaches, quaint farming life, and luscious green hills. Cars of all kinds have remained constant in his life.

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• Photos Courtesy Of Ben Harvey
• FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS After growing up in Devon, England, Ben Harvey moved to the Central Coast and got a job as a mechanic. While doing that, he turned an old engine into coffee table that his friends and family loved so much he decided to turn his passion into a business.

"My family has a shop over there, so I grew up basically taking engines apart to keep me out of trouble. They would always give me the old broken ones, and I thought they were really cool," he said.

After Harvey met his wife, Chloee, a San Luis Obispo County native, they needed to decide where they were going to live together, the Central Coast or the U.K. They picked California after Harvey said he fell in love with the "up and coming town" of Atascadero and the hiking trails the county offered.

"I was a mechanic here in America, and I built myself a coffee table that everyone thought was cool and I decided maybe there was a market for them," he said.

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• Photos Courtesy Of Ben Harvey
• DESK BUDDY From desk clocks to little friends, Ben's Automotive Decor works on fun gifts that offer a laugh.

Thus in 2012 began the story of Ben's Automotive Décor, where Chloee handles the paperwork and Ben does the crafting.

"People often have a passion for a certain car, and I'll build them a table of it—like if they're into Ferraris, I'll build them a piece out of a certain Ferrari that they like, and it means more to them rather than just some generic engine," he said. "We also get stuff with racing history. If a famous racing driver raced an engine and then it's retired, then we can get hold of the engine and build an art piece with it and that means a lot to them."

A huge racing fan himself, Harvey said he was blessed with the opportunity to craft a table with one of former Formula One racer Michael Schumacher's old engines, and it remains one of his favorite pieces.

For those who want a custom piece but don't have access to a readily available engine, Harvey said he takes his time to find the right parts through a network of sources he's built up over time.

"Not very many actually come from around here; a lot of them come from the U.K. because there's a lot of big racing in the U.K.," he said. "I ship a lot over from England, and I go over there to source and build contacts."

Custom pieces can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months to create.

Harvey said most of his ideas pop into his head at night while he's resting. For instance, he crafted battery-operated spinning tables that show how an engine actually works. The valves go up and down with the pistons. However, he said that since he's not much of a drawer, everything he dreams up goes straight from his memory to reality.

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• Photos Courtesy Of Ben Harvey
• EVERYTHING BUT THE ENGINE Ben's Automotive Decor offers wall art for car lovers who want to spice up their living spaces or offices.

"I'm just terrible at sketching. ... I can see what I need to make but I cannot draw it. Like even yesterday, I'm working on a custom project for an NFL footballer, and he asked me for a sketch, and I said I can't give you a sketch because it'll look horrible," he said with a laugh.

While the engine is his favorite car part, Harvey also makes pieces with other elements, such a toilet paper holder crafted out of a wrench.

"There's a bunch of different things available when people come in," he said. "They can buy a custom clock or even just come in and say hi." Δ

Reach Staff Writer Samantha Herrera at [email protected].