“I went cold turkey and quit after my last performance in my home town in 1986,” Sarah Faust recollected. A precocious musician, Sarah was five when she played in her first recital and had become an accomplished classical-ly-trained concert pianist by her mid-twenties. When her parents bought her a “fairly new" Steinway, Sarah instantly concluded that “the piano had many problems, as did all of the Steinways from that particular period. It wasn't what it used to be."
Thus began the search for the perfect piano. Sarah looked at older Steinways and discovered that these “had a soul.” She purchased one, had some work done on it, and deter-mined that she had found her musical match. What began as a hobby eventually grew into a full-fledged business run by Sarah and her husband. They were living in Manhattan with their two young children when she recognized that there was a demand for old Steinways. As she continued to restore the pianos, “the money was fast, and from our perspective back then, it was a lot.” By the time they moved to the suburbs, they had a thriving business. “Every year it grew and grew — we started owning the business, but then it began owning us.”
