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Last year, when Conde Nast was looking for someone to build its spiffy new Frank Gehry-designed lunchroom with its massively contorted plate glass walls, it turned to a company that had been through quite a few contortions of its own. For the technically demanding task, the New York publishing giant called in Rambusch Decorating Co., a firm that only eight years earlier had entered into a bankruptcy that many had never expected it to escape.
Today, the 102-year-old Manhattan-based firm is back. 1999 was the best year ever for the company, whose custom-designed light fixtures have been featured in museum shows and whose crafts projects have ranged from the decade-long renovation of Trinity Church at the foot of Wall Street to the creation of an opulent lobby for the Bear Stearns building on Park Avenue. Revenues that year hit $7.5 million, more than double the previous record set in 1989.
Beating the odds
If ever there were a model on how to bounce back from bankruptcy, Rambusch is it. David Berger, an associate with...