By the time David Hurlbut bought the Harmony Club, a 20,000-square-foot building on the waterfront in Selma, it had been abandoned for nearly 40 years. Built in 1909 as a social club by a group of prominent Jewish businessmen, it had been turned into an Elks club in the 1930s; when the Elks disbanded in 1960, the building was boarded up. Hurlbut, 47, first saw it more than a decade ago, when he was working as an industrial designer in Atlanta, where he was born and raised. He found it through historicproperties.com, a website he compares to an addictive drug. (It's like 'my crack,' he said.) The building's sole inhabitants were a flock of pigeons that left behind what he estimates to be about 140 cubic yards of guano. There was no plumbing, and the electrical wiring was 'in shambles,' he said. Still, he knew he'd found his home. 'I thought it would be a perfect clubhouse for me,' he said. 'It's probably a guy thing.' He was also enamored of Selma, a sleepy river town he likens to 'an inland Charleston or Savannah.' After a few visits, he bought the Harmony Club for just under $100,000, paid in full, and moved in three months later, on Jan. 1, 2000. One of his first tasks was hauling out what the pigeons had left behind -- which filled a series of Dumpsters -- but that didn't faze him. Hurlbut's home in downtown Atlanta had been built in 1884 as a grocery store and was being used as a crack house when he bought it. 'I see things a little differently,' he said. 'I can see six, eight, nine months down the road.' Or in the case of the Harmony Club, two years. That's how long it took to make the building what he describes as 'remotely habitable by most people's standards,' while he continued to work as an industrial designer and architectural consultant to support himself. Hurlbut has done most of the renovation work himself -- which, so far, has cost about $150,000, he said -- and has taken great care to preserve the architectural details, leaving the walls unfinished, although he occasionally experiments with polyurethane paint to keep the flakes of original wall coloring from falling off the walls. Now, 10 years after he began the work, the building's ground-floor commercial space is finished enough to lease out; an Italian restaurant will open there sometime in the next year, he said. Hurlbut rents one of the bedrooms on the second floor to a friend, Bill Tomey, 50, a photographer and filmmaker. On the third floor is a ballroom with 30-foot ceilings, where he and Tomey host movie nights and an annual Beaux Arts Ball. 'A lot of people call us the Studio 54 of Selma,' he said. Hurlbut, who describes his aesthetic as 'neo-Gilded Age steampunk,' has furnished the vast interior mostly with 'big castle-y furniture' purchased at auctions. Finding pieces that aren't dwarfed by the scale of the building is difficult, he said. But 'bigger pieces of furniture are cheaper in price because no one has room to keep them anymore.' He added: 'It's very Ken Follett, 'The Pillars of the Earth.'' Nowhere is the Harmony Club's scale and history more apparent than in the bathroom on the second floor, where Hurlbut has preserved the white-tiled communal shower room in its entirety -- altering it only by hanging a large crucifix on the wall. 'The other day a guy called and said, 'What are you doing?'' Hurlbut said. 'I said, 'I just got out of the shower.' He said, 'You're sharing too much.' I said, 'Brother, I'm not sharing, I'm bragging.' I'll never turn around and knock over the shampoo; the shower's big enough to sublease.' Keywords: Selector:selfnewsHG 