18
ETHOS
Ward with
David Brien,
team leader
for the
Thriftmaster
series. Each
of Icon’s three
vehicle series
has a team
leader, as does
every Reformer
and Derelict
project.New York. He characteristically turned
fanatic and started buying, fixing, and
flipping cars out of his home garage.
He enrolled in auto shop classes and
started hanging around hot-rod legend
Tony Nancy’s upholstery shop in
Sherman Oaks. “He’d take something
and elevate and evolve it,” Ward says,
but when Nancy re-created factory-
perfect wisps of primer overspray,
young Ward wondered, “Why is it
‘right’ to repeat imperfections?”
The teen traveled at least two months
a year, and when he went overseas—
Africa, Asia, Australia, the Middle East—
he saw flocks of Toyota Land Cruiser
FJ40s, handsome and resilient rigs
with aesthetics that imply functional-
ity. Ward succumbed to his new siren
and started hunting down FJs in his ’
Ford F-250 powered by a 351 Cleveland
engine lifted from a De Tomaso Pantera.
He’d prowl small towns in New Mexico,
Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, thumb
through Penny Savers and local news-
papers, and tow home any FJ worth
restoring. “All of this hobby started to
go out of control, but it seemed to me
there’d be a lot of people like myself
who traveled and dug Land Cruisers,
who would come into the market if you
elevated the quality of what you were
presenting,” he recalls.As he approached his 20s, embittered by Hollywood,
Ward decided to quit acting. The woman he was dating,
Jamie, also wanted to leave her job, so during a romantic
dinner in South Africa, he said to her, “I know my hobby is
more fulfilling and makes me a happier person, and I think
we can live off of it. ... We can make it work.” When the cou-
ple returned to America, Ward fired his agent, Jamie quit
her job in music management, and together they started
flipping FJs full time. They rented glass frontage and 1,
square feet of shop space in Van Nuys and opened TLC 4x4.
“We took all the trucks I already had, packed that place
like a sardine can, and put a Post-it note on the door, ‘Call
if interested,’ and I carried around my brick Motorola and
waited for it to ring,” Ward says. The neighboring shop had
a betting pool for when the pair would fail, but TLC 4x
became an unanticipated sensation after Ward traded an
FJ for something called a website. Suddenly TLC 4x4 had
clients around the world, including car museums, Toyota
dealerships, and even Mr. Toyoda himself, who asked Ward
to build three classic FJs to accompany the FJ Cruiser con-
cept that made its debut at the 2003 Detroit auto show.