Customizing the Countertop, Part I

January 3, 2003

By K. Schipper

Producing multiple copies of the same layouts for big interior countertop jobs – such as large office buildings or big housing developments – is fueling the boom in stone usage and creating massive fabrication businesses. So what’s that doing to the smaller shops in the trade?
A peek into several operations around the country shows those smaller operations riding the wave of stone’s popularity with their own niche: Custom countertops. Whether it’s a one-of-a-kind design for new construction, or part of a house remodeling, doing the unique work is paying off and triggering ideas of shop expansion at the smaller end of the market.
It’s not all fancy artisan work, either. Sometimes it’s doing jobs as part of services bought through home centers; or, it could involve contracting out kitchen fixture and wiring to smooth out the installation process. For these fabricators, however, it’s work that they’re glad to have.

Onis Stone
Haltom, Texas
Sheri Bennett admits that she and her husband, Bob, are always seeking creative niches to fill with his stonework, so doing custom countertops is a natural for their business. The company’s name, in fact, is an acronym for “Our Name Is Specialty.”
“All our countertops are custom,” Sheri Bennett says, “because they’re all templated and made to fit the cabinet. What sets us apart are our unique back splash designs, our definitive edge profiles and our sinks cast from natural stone.”
The company has also recently added custom baseboards, door surrounds and moldings made from granite, marble, travertine and limestone.
Much of the Bennetts’ work does into home renovations. The main reason for that, Sheri Bennett says, is that more homeowners are renovating instead of purchasing new homes.
“When we do new construction, the homeowner shops around and compares bids, then goes back to the builder and says, ‘I want this from these people,’” she explains. “Often times, they end up buying it outright from us, because the builder won’t budge from what’s often times a cookie-cutter building process. They want to turn out these homes quickly, even the custom ones.”
As for their renovation jobs, Bennett says the work is all over the board. While one client may spend thousands remodeling a bath, another may only spend a few hundred sprucing up the kitchen with granite countertops.
Granite is Onis’ main kitchen stone, but it’s not the only one.
“Since we have a good supply of travertine from Mexico here, people are branching out that way because it gives them more of the Old World look,” Bennett says. “We do some slates, too.”
Because the majority of the work is with renovations, Bennett adds that a great deal of the time they’re working directly with the homeowners. She estimates that only one in five has much knowledge of natural stone, the installation process and its care, and many of those are repeat customers. Consequently, a lot of their sales work involves educating would-be buyers.
“Our feeling is the best way to maintain satisfied customers is to teach them all we know,” she says.
With many homeowners acting as their own general contractors on their remodeling projects, Bennett says Onis’ services have even evolved into contracting out the plumbing and electrical work that can come up in their portion of these projects.
“We just become the contractor as far as that part of it,” she says. “It’s meeting the demand for what the customer wants. It can bring up a lot of headaches, but we still work to make our customers happy.”
Consequently, the couple presently contracts out its installation work, although Bennett says at some future point – possibly the end of 2003 – she hopes the company can get out of the electrical and plumbing end and add in-house installers.
That, plus the addition of some equipment such as a CNC machine and an edge machine, is predicated on the firm’s finding a new, larger location near its current spot in a Fort Worth, Texas, suburb.
“I need a larger facility,” Bennett concludes. “We’ve just grown so much recently. I’ve got a showroom at one location with a warehouse from which we sell tile. The fabrication shop is about five miles away from here. We’re going to try to coordinate our resources under one roof, which will help us provide a better service for our clients.”

Bluegrass Granite, Tile and Marble
Nicholsville, Ky.
Steve Bishop is one of two fabricators employed by Bluegrass, and he says the last two years in particular have been extremely busy for him and the company.
“We’re enjoying more business than we can handle,” he says. “Especially this year, we’ve been turning away way too much work.”
Some of that is probably due to the demanding nature of his schedule. Bishop does everything for a given job from taking the measurements and making the template, to fabricating the stone and finishing it, and also handling the installation.
However, he says a lot of it is also because the demand for custom countertops in nearby Lexington, Ky. – the company’s main market area — is very high right now.
Bishop estimates that fully 60 percent of the firm’s kitchen work is in renovations. And, that’s just the nature of the current real estate market there.
“We’re a fairly old community and there are certain neighborhoods where the demand for the houses is quite high,” he explains. “A lot of them haven’t had anything done to them for quite awhile. People are putting a lot of money into buying in these neighborhoods, but then they want to bring the houses up-to-date.”
That frequently includes updating the kitchen, and it can also extend to the master bedroom and bath, as well. Because the company’s owner is a tile setter, customers may utilize a mix of tile and granite – seldom other stone – in their kitchens.
“We do quite a bit of marble work in master bathrooms project,” Bishop says. “As a rule we never recommend marble for kitchen counters. We’ve done only a couple, and in both cases we’ve had regrets about it because of things that can happen in the kitchen.”
Most of the time, clients will come in with their completed plans, and while they occasionally use architects, Bishop says he often times ends up working directly with the homeowners. Fortunately, he says, many of them seem to know what they want.
“Often, their expectations are high because they feel they’re spending a lot of money,” he says. “However, I feel we do a good job meeting those expectations; we don’t get a lot of complaints.”
Bishop prides himself on his craftsmanship. He’s worked as a fabricator and mechanic for close to 30 years, and while Bluegrass has a large bridge saw and a profiling machine, much of his work is still done by hand. One of his personal specialties is undermount work, and he says he’d never be interested in getting into a shop where the emphasis is on commercial production.
“I like the way the jobs come to us,” he concludes. “From a personal standpoint I find it easier to concentrate on custom work. We take on one job at a time and try to do a good job of it all the time and that suits my nature.”

Sellers Tile
Albany, Ga.
When Scott Braswell of Sellers Tile says, “There’s a very big demand right now for custom countertops,” in his market, he isn’t kidding.
Braswell says he’s doing a substantial amount of work just in kitchens, and some of his granite suppliers tell him he buys more granite per capita than any of their other East Coast customers. All in all, it’s a good day’s work for a company that’s been in business for only six years.
While he attributes a lot of the firm’s success to the fact that there’s little competition in his area, it may also have something to do with having the contract to fabricate for 16 Lowe’s Home Improvement stores in the Southeast, as well as having five retail outlets of Sellers Tile.
Still, Braswell says many of his sales are based having plenty of satisfied customers.
“One thing I’ve learned in business is that if there’s a problem you have to go back and fix it,” he says. “People will always remember that.”
Along with turning out a caliber of work that Braswell says, “I would accept in my own house,” the Sellers Tile showroom staffs include interior decorators who work with customers to make sure they understand the ins and outs of what they’re buying.
The Lowe’s jobs are facilitated by a Greensboro, N.C., company, Alternative Surface Products, which generates a quote for the client based on information faxed from the particular Lowe’s store. Once the client accepts the quote, the same information is faxed to Braswell, who sets up a time to visit the client’s home to measure and make the template.
“I show up, make the template, come home, cut the job, and go back and put it in,” he explains.
While it’s a setup that might seem more attractive to homeowners doing renovations, Braswell estimates fully 70 percent of his work is done on new construction. Since Sellers Tile offers stone, tile, carpeting and hardwood floors, there are many homes where the company does an entire package, with custom countertops – mostly granite — playing only a small part in the bigger picture.
Still, Braswell has a substantial fabrication setup, with 14 employees operating two saws, three routers and two hole-dropping machines. And, he expects that to only get bigger and better in the near future.
“I don’t have a CNC machine,” he says. “We’re planning – probably within 18 months – to build a new high-tech shop, and getting a CNC machine is going to be the next step.”
Still, with plenty of custom jobs to keep him busy, Braswell doesn’t anticipate doing anything but one-of-a-kind countertop jobs on into the future. It is, he says, what got him in the business in the first place.
“I guess the reason I like this job is because it’s always a different color, a different shape and a different location,” he concludes. “It’s not the same old production line, and that’s what I like about it.”