Exciting Architectural Design Innovations at Our Recent Bond Event

Front doors are so important in a home design. They are the first things you encounter and touch when you enter, so they should be amazing. We can do wood and glass, but after so many, the variations start to feel limited.

Versco is a company that manufactures front doors. They do offer wood in a variety of colors. They also offer ceramic doors that look like you would never have to redo them. They also offer a ceramic/stone option, called Dekton® by Cosentino that you can put it on tons of designs. Dekton® is a mixture of more than 20 natural minerals that are ultracompacted to reduce porosity. We are really excited about this architectural design innovation, and you may be hearing more from us about front door designs soon.

Accoya makes a great acetylated wood product. The company makes an ultra-high performance sustainable wood that can be used for wood siding, decks, windows and doors. The company says the product out-performs hardwood siding, and we have been very pleased with the results in our projects, like Latimer. Accoya has a process using their local, sustainable pine, that makes the product durable. The process includes a reaction with acetic anhydride at high heat, causing it to have more or moisture resistant acetyl groups and thus be more resistant to water. The process also helps the product hold the color better, and the color goes all the way through! They stand behind the product with a 50-year warranty for above ground uses, and 25 years for in ground or fresh water uses. We used this product in key rooms of the Latimer project, both inside and outside, and after 5+ years, there has been no fading!

Dean explained that this architectural design Innovation feels a little cerebral, but another sustainable wood product, by Eva-Last, has wood composite on top of metal. He explains “They have a process where they adhere bamboo wood composite to the outside of an aluminum core, so when you touch it, it feels like wood, but it’s more.” The bamboo plastic composite (BPC) is used for outdoor decking and cladding applications. This product is lighter and has higher durability, with less environmental impact from its manufacture. The company also offers a 10 year warranty on this product that is designed to meet industrial standard. Dean says, “A lot of people use Trex but it doesn’t feel like a real deck-doesn’t look like wood, doesn’t feel like wood. It’s like Formica that looks like marble. The minute I touch it, I know it’s not marble because marble would be cold. We like to have a multidimensional aspect to projects for them to pass our litmus test: to assure we are creating designs that are well-rounded and thoughtfully consider multiple aspects of the architecture and its impact. Eva-Last has pieces you could use on a trellis and never have to maintain it. That’s a big deal. We are going to be specifying this on one of our upcoming projects because a trellis was designed into it before the client said I don’t want to have to do any maintenance.”