Gregg Buchbinder and I are driving through southern Pennsylvania in a rented Nissan Pathfinder. Our destination is Emeco, the aluminum-furniture factory his family owns in Hanover. It's a beautiful drive that takes us through a rolling landscape of dairy farms and tidy red-brick towns that don't seem to have changed much since the Amish and Mennonites first settled in the area. "Hanover is a very isolated place," says Buchbinder as we exit the interstate and approach the town, 10 miles from the Maryland border. "I once overheard a clerk tell a customer that she didn't care who he was, she required full payment up front. After she hung up, I asked her who she had been talking to. She wasn't even able to pronounce the name. Turns out it was Giorgio Armani."

At a time when American manufacturing is recovering its place in the world's economy, the story of Emeco and its swords-into-plowshares transformation is a curious one. Founded in 1944 to make aluminum chairs, tables, and lockers for the Navy, Emeco is now enjoying a second act as a purveyor of retro chic. Once found on destroyers and submarines, the Emeco 1006 chair--pronounced "ten-oh-six" and also known as the Navy or Miami chair--can now be seen in the restaurant of the Paramount Hotel in New York, as well as in Starbucks' flagship store and the Frank Gehry-designed New York Deli, both in Los Angeles.

What makes Emeco's transformation all the more miraculous is that it was entirely un-planned. Buchbinder's father, Jay, purchased Emeco 21 years ago with the idea of reviving its sagging military business. The Buchbinders operate Jay Buchbinder Industries (JBI), a successful Long Beach, California, manufacturer of contract furniture for schools and fast-food restaurants. Until two years ago, when Jay sent Gregg to Pennsylvania to oversee Emeco, the elder Buchbinder had been largely unaware of the firm's renaissance among the design cognoscenti.

"The first thing I realized was that we needed to focus on what we do best," says Gregg Buchbinder as we pull up to the factory and park in front of a hand-lettered sign bearing his first name. What he discovered was that, by 1998, what Emeco did best was to sell chairs to leading interior designers. So Gregg took over managing the firm, and now he flies to Wash-ington, D.C., once a month, rents a car, and drives an hour and a half to Hanover. This time he's rented a sports utility vehicle to haul film equipment; he's invited Eames Demetrios, a Los Angeles filmmaker and the grandson of Charles Eames, to make a documentary on the production of the 1006 chair.

While the 43-year-old Buchbinder appears to be a newcomer to the world of high design, his father actually played a small role in its early history. As a young engineer in the 1950s, Jay Buchbinder made the metal parts for designs by Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, and Eero Saarinen before branching out into larger and more lucrative institutional projects. But it's Gregg's charm and enthusiasm that have helped turn Emeco around. Last year, for the first time in more than 20 years, the company posted a profit and paid a bonus to its employees. The company also hooked up with Inter-national Contract Furniture (ICF) of New York, a manufacturer's representative that handles the designs of Alvar Aalto and Josef Hoffman. In addition to polished aluminum, the standard Emeco line is now available in seven colors. The 1006 chair was used in a prison scene in the film The Matrix and appears regularly in design magazines, on television shows, and in fashion layouts.

"Emeco was such a funny company," says Dan Fogelson, the marketing director of ICF. "Here they were only manufacturing one line of furniture, the same furniture that was made more than a half century ago. Most manufacturers turn out eight or nine different lines. Their main competitors are the vintage furniture dealers who sell 50-year-old Emeco chairs from moth-balled ships. Until Gregg came along, we didn't even know that Emeco was still in business."

Buchbinder and his father both recognize that a line of furniture created in the 1940s for the Navy can very easily become yesterday's fashion item. They also recognize the firm's main assets: the plant, the workers, and a special process that results in finely wrought, feather-light products that literally last a lifetime. Although the 1006 looks like it's produced in a mold, it bears the imprint of experienced craftsmen. No two Emeco chairs are the same.

This month Gregg Buchbinder will attempt to permanently reposition the company by releasing a new line called "Emeco by Starck." The choice of the flamboyant French designer isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Philippe Starck has used Emeco products in many of his interior designs and has long proclaimed his love for them. But for Starck's first line of furniture to be manufactured in the United States, the designer has left his wild aesthetic flourishes behind. Emeco by Starck takes the standard Emeco design and gives it a cleaned-up, contemporary look. The line includes 13 chairs and four tables. The designer is especially proud of a simple, stacking chair. He has also designed dining and work chairs with slanted, closed backs and straight legs. "The Emeco chair is an icon," says the high-spirited designer in a phone interview from Paris, where he's putting the finishing touches on Bon, a restaurant in which he uses 1006 chairs. "But it's time to update the icon. That's what I'm doing. The idea is a little tricky because you must protect the spirit of Emeco."

In fact, Emeco by Starck is a risky proposition for the company. A large part of Emeco's original appeal is that the line is an all-American, undesigned classic that harks back to the era of post-World War II optimism.

Will a cleaned-up classic by the Gallic wild man be able to launch the firm into the next century? The company has already invested more than $1 million in development costs, but even if the Starck line fails to meet sales ex-pectations, the Buchbinders remain committed to the spirit of the place. For Gregg Buch-binder, especially, Emeco has become more than a moneymaking proposition. It's a devotion to a way of life that is slow, careful, deliberate, and ecological.

With the enthusiasm of a child taking a friend home after school, Buchbinder gives me a tour of the plant. The sound of metal being ground, polished, and buffed on high-speed machines fills the air with a deafening screech. Deme-trios and crew are busy filming the two-week, 77-step process that the Emeco chair goes through on its way to becoming a sculptured masterwork. The chair begins as 12 different sections, which are welded together. At each step along the way, the chair is ground to smooth out the welds and create a seamless look that has led some people to believe that the 1006 is cast in a mold. To strengthen it, the chair is then heat-treated, cooled off, and heated again in a process that causes its molecules to realign in a stronger formation.

Buchbinder is especially proud of the welders. Most of them have been working for Emeco for more than 10 years. In fact, most of the workers in the plant are older men who've spent their entire lives doing the same simple task over and over again. We stop to admire the work of Raymond Hilker, as he deftly applies his torch to a piece of metal, a 1006 chair leg, heating it to a white glow before bonding it to the seat pan. The surrounding welders all heat, bond, and fuse in uncanny, rhythmic unison, as if in a training film. It's a bit like an exhibit from the 1939 World's Fair extolling the virtues of "happy workers."

The most impressive piece of machinery in the plant is a 60-year-old metal press, which creates the chair's seat pan. It's a faded red machine that towers more than 15 feet over Phil Hawn, a prickly operator who's been with the firm for 33 years and has a reputation for criticizing the work of those he thinks aren't doing their part to uphold the Emeco tradition. The 15-person grinding department features Joe Bear Sr.; his son, Joe Jr.; and his nephew, Richard Bear. The family's association with Emeco dates back to the early days of the company.

Emeco was founded in 1944, in Baltimore, by Witton C. "Bud" Dinges, a Johns Hopkins-educated engineer who wanted to cash in on the booming business of supplying the military with steel and aluminum furniture. The company, which is an acronym for Electric Machine and Equipment Company, moved to Hanover in 1947 because Dinges had heard that there were highly skilled hand laborers in the area. In 1954, the firm moved into the current factory on Elm Street, a glass and stone Modernist building at the base of a sloping green lawn.

"Mr. Dinges was quite a character," says Buchbinder. Like most of the Emeco staff, he has acquired a reverence for "Mr. Dinges," who died in 1974 at the age of 57 and was already part of company lore by the time Jay Buchbinder purchased the firm in 1979. Dinges was unquestionably a brilliant engineer. Working with scientists from Alcoa, he devised a process for manufacturing aluminum furniture that far exceeded the Navy's strict specifications. Emeco furniture was engineered to withstand torpedo blasts to the side of a destroyer. The chairs are so strong that most of the original ones are still in perfect condition more than 50 years later.

But Dinges was not a good businessman and, due to the elaborate manufacturing process, didn't find it easy to squeeze a profit out of Emeco, even during wartime. He also had what could be characterized as an eccentric grasp of marketing. Once, during a furniture show in Chicago, he threw an Emeco chair out of a sixth-floor window to demonstrate its durability. It landed on the sidewalk outside the busy Palmer House Hotel and, except for a few scratches, was in perfect shape. In the mid-1950s Dinges created seven ads that ran in Fortune. Each one depicted a different sculpture by Rodin; above the bronzes, in large letters, the ads read: "Sculpted Masterworks." The name Emeco was in small letters at the bottom. "A lot of people called, asking, eWhat do you make?'" recalls William Jerry Geisel-man, who was Emeco's chief operating officer at the time.

Geiselman took over after Dinges died and eventually sold the struggling company to Jay Buchbinder, who tried unsuccessfully to revive the military end of the business. The company even tried, briefly, to make wood furniture. "I thought about closing the place," says the elder Buchbinder. "But I couldn't bring myself to do it because of the Emeco process. I knew that if I closed it no one was going to make furniture like that again." Geiselman ran the company for the Buchbinders until his retirement in 1984. By then the 1006 had been discovered by hip interior designers. One of the last things Geiselman remembers doing before he retired is taking a call from an editor at Italian Vogue, who wanted four chairs for a shoot in Milan. "In retrospect we should have been more ag-gressive about taking the company in a fashion direction," says Geiselman, "but we just didn't have the contacts that the Buchbinders did."

Gregg Buchbinder hopes that the Starck collaboration will be the first of many between prominent designers and the company. At its peak military production, the 150,000-square-foot plant employed 300, turning out thousands of 1006 chairs a month for fleets of ships. Today the company em-ploys just 35 workers and completes about 1,000 chairs a month. With that much unused production capability, Buchbinder has room for his big plans. He models his aspirations on two other high-design manufacturers, Knoll and Vitra, and says he would like to revive designs from the 1930s.

"Gregg is an angel," says Starck. "I was amazed that someone so open, so fresh, owned Emeco." Buchbinder met Starck at the International Contemp-orary Furniture Fair (sponsored by Metropolis) in New York, in 1998, shortly after he took control of the company. After listening to Starck give a lecture in which he compared himself to a bacterium, Buchbinder walked up to the designer and thanked him for using the Emeco chair at the Paramount.

Starck, it turned out, was thrilled to meet Buchbinder. Unbeknownst to anyone at Emeco, the designer had been thinking about ways to update the 1006, but had reasonably assumed that such an old-school company wouldn't be interested. "When Philippe asked me if he could possibly do some designs for us, I said yes," says Buchbinder. "He doesn't really take on new clients anymore, but this was something that he really wanted to do."

Adds Buchbinder: "I was worried that Philippe would want a huge fee to design for us, but he didn't even discuss money until I told him that I couldn't afford to pay him anything. I offered him a stake in the company. He said he didn't want one." Instead Emeco will pay Starck an undisclosed royalty. "He could've taken his designs to Steelcase and made a big, fat fee."

Starck chose to design for Emeco for a simple reason. "I have always admired the way the Emeco chair is put together," he says. "I thought if I could design a line of furniture that becomes a classic like that chair, then I would be doing something great. I have designed a great number of things I am not proud of, and they are no longer around. I want to design things that are here forever. I think it's time to stop wasting what's on the planet."

The design process for Emeco by Starck started with sketches on the back of a magazine in the lobby of the Royalton Hotel in New York, the day after the two men met. "Starck knew exactly what he wanted to do," Buchbinder says. "He'd already thought it through." The designer made only minor aesthetic corrections on each prototype Buchbinder presented. "I had heard Starck could be a prima donna," says Buchbinder. "But that wasn't my experience."

For the designer, Emeco by Stark is a bit of a departure, a considerably more conservative approach. But Starck turned 50 last year and feels that he's become mellower in his middle age. Buchbinder now leads me out of the busy plant as workers put finishing touches on the new line. A deadline looms: the premiere of Emeco by Starck at the Milan furniture fair in April (the line will have its American debut a month later at the ICFF). For the Emeco craftsmen, many of whom "have spent the last 30 years standing in the same square foot of factory space, making the same single product," the process of learning to manufacture an entire line of new designs was "remarkably challenging," says Buchbinder. But he adds, "These old guys are so into it. They were able to figure out how to adapt our process to all kinds of furniture. They've actually made the 1006 better. They're working nights and weekends. They're fired up."

Jeffrey Hogrefe is the author of O'Keefe: The Life of an American Legend.