Sweet Cheeks Winery, Crow, Ore

   From a change in materials to an unexpected attack by Mother Nature to some last-minute additions, it became a battle to meet the scheduled opening day. Thanks to a lot of hard work, the project was completed on time … and the granite countertops continue to garner favorable comments.
   Lorrie Normann, the winery’s general manager, explains that the Sweet Cheeks label is quite new, although the 65-acre vineyard that supplies its grapes was planted 28 years ago on slopes overlooking the Lorane Valley a few miles southwest of Eugene, Ore.
   Its first vintage, a pinot noir, was bottled in 2003. The winery also produces pinot gris, Riesling and chardonnay.
   However, to house the winery, owner Dan Smith opted to rescue a 50-year-old building moved from Junction City, Ore., to the site in mid-2004. As work began on renovating the structure, Normann says there was no question about using natural materials.
   “We used all natural stone and Oregon hardwoods for the entire construction,” she says. “We have tumbled travertine on the floors, a soapstone fireplace, Oregon chinquapin on the ceilings and ash and hickory in the bar.”
   Smith and Normann also didn’t give much consideration to using anything other than granite for the winery’s countertops.
   “I have granite in my home, Dan has granite in his, and we’ve never had any problems with it,” says Normann.
   As work on the building’s renovation began in earnest, Smith and Normann started taking bids on the countertops for the winery, which includes a gourmet kitchen, the back bar in the wine-tasting room and a cheese case. Among the companies they contacted was Bennett Stone & Tile in nearby Eugene.
   “They had done the granite in Dan’s farmhouse, so he knew them,” says Normann. “They also have a name in this area for quality. We got several bids, and they weren’t necessarily the cheapest, but they were able to work with our timeline, and we knew it would be good quality work.”
   Jeffrey Bennett started Bennett Stone & Tile 16 years ago, after recognizing the importance slabs would have in the residential stone market. Today, the company operates a 24,000 ft² showroom, warehouse and fabrication facility in Eugene, and additional showrooms in Medford and Portland, Ore. (The company is also the Oregon distributor of Cambria® Natural Quartz Surfaces.)
   Both Normann and Susan Bates, the Bennett salesperson who handled the Sweet Cheeks job, say the clients had a pretty good idea of what granite they wanted for the project going into it.
   “We’d been looking at the Bordeaux granite, which is very red,” says Normann. “We saw it at a home show and it’s the color we went for. Bennett had a sample and we had it in the winery for months just waiting until it was time to get the granite.”
   “The reds were the direction they were focusing on,” says Bates. “They wanted an Italianate look and feel, something that was in sort of a wine color.”
   However, when the time arrived for the clients to pick out their slabs, Bates says Bennett had only a swatch and some remnants of the Bordeaux on hand.
   “We agreed that I would get them appointments to go see several of our suppliers in Portland,” says Bates. “I was confident they knew what they wanted as far as the color range was concerned, they felt it was important to hand-select their slabs, and they were really on a mission to get this selected.”
   Because of scheduling conflicts, Bates adds that she wasn’t able to make the two-hour trip to Portland with Smith and Normann. However, after not seeing what they wanted at the first supplier they visited, the pair traveled to a second supplier – and found something totally different.
   “They opted to go with a stone called Crema Bordeaux,” says Bates. “It’s best described as a terra cotta with wine and chocolate and rust and cream striping. It’s very striated.”
   “You go in and you think you know what you want, and then you kind of move toward other things,” says Normann of the switch. “We think we went with a granite that was a little more timeless than what we had originally planned on.”
   The four slabs needed for the project were reserved and then shipped to Eugene, where the crew at Bennett Stone & Tile was in for its own surprise.
   “It was the first time we had ever seen this stone in our facility, and it was absolutely gorgeous,” says Bates. “The only thing was that the stone they selected was a 2cm stone that’s not self-supporting. Our shop normally works at 3cm, so there was a little concern there.”
   Austin Swartout, Bennett’s shop foreman, agrees that his biggest concern was that the stone, at that thickness, isn’t self-supporting. The clients were instructed to have their carpenters install subdecking on the cabinets that were going to receive the stone tops.
   Then, while the subdecking was being installed and the project templated, another potential crisis developed in the stoneyard, where the slabs were resting on A-frames.
   “We had a huge storm come into town, and one of the slabs was blown over in the wind and crushed,” says Bates. “We contacted the supplier and were able to have another slab sent from the same bundle that matched the rest of the project.
   “It’s always pretty scary when something like that happens.”
    Swartout says from a production standpoint, things went along fairly smoothly. Because of the commercial nature of the job and the clients’ initial plans to open for Labor Day weekend of 2005, “for commercial jobs, we try to bump things up. In this situation, fabrication moved fairly rapidly.”
   Bates estimates it took only two weeks from the time the job was templated until it was in production.
   From his perspective, Swartout says the edges presented some challenge because of the need to laminate the 2cm material.
   “The edge profile was an ogee on top of a bullnose, a typical bullnose with a 2cm ogee groove on the top,” he says. “We do a lot of that in 3cm, but not in laminated 4cm, although it’s the same profile.”
   He adds that particular care was taken so the colors matched on the lamination. And, because the Crema Bordeaux is a resin-treated material, some work had to be done to match the edges with the top using an industry aging product.
   The grain of the stone also presented some challenges laying out the work.
   “We usually run our seams at 90°,” Swartout says. “In this situation, we ran our seam on the 45° angle from corner-to-corner so we’d have the grain going into each other, instead of going in two different directions.”
   Installation was fairly straightforward, he adds, although there were some small problems with an uneven cabinet top and with getting the grain to match in one corner.
   “The scheduling was fine, although it was tight,” says the winery’s Normann. “They really did try to work with us, and that was beneficial. We had a definite weekend to open, and I don’t know if a lot of other places would have worked so diligently with our time schedule.”
   Unfortunately, due to other reasons, the business didn’t make its initially scheduled opening, and by the time the winery did unveil its new facility – at Thanksgiving last year – Bennett had been called on to add a Crema Bordeaux backsplash to the back bar in the wine-tasting room, and three matching windowsills.
   “We’ve really got granite everywhere,” concludes Normann. She adds that because of the multitude of colors in the stone and its resin finish, she’s confident it will stay looking new for years to come.
   “And, the customers just love it; we get oohs-and-aahs all the time.”

Client: Sweet Cheeks Winery, Crow, Ore.
Fabricator/Installer: Bennett Stone & Tile, Eugene, Ore.

This article first appeared in the October 2006 print edition of Stone Business. ©2006 Western Business Media Inc.