As published in Toledo Business Journal - January 1, 2017
LivingSpace Sunrooms, a provider of four-season sunrooms and conservatories, currently manufacturers its products for distribution across the county from its production facility in Perrysburg.
According to Mike Francis, director of sales, the company has always been local to the Toledo area, moving from Maumee to Holland to Perrysburg over the last several years. In early 2017, the company plans to move into a much larger, 110,000 square foot space on Holland Road in Maumee. Signature Associate’s Robert P. Mack was the leasing agent representing LivingSpace Sunrooms in this large transaction, and Reichle Klein Group’s Ronald J. Jurgenson represented the lessor, Willis Day Properties.
“We started out, developed, and patented a very unique sunroom,” said Francis. “When most people think about a sunroom, they have this almost negative view of this metal patio enclosure-type shed that doesn’t look too appealing, and those rooms have a reputation of being too warm in the summer and too cold in the winter. We’ve sort of taken that as a reason to create the Living Space Sunrooms. We’re more like a sunroom addition. By doing that, we’ve created a niche. We’ve almost reinvented sunrooms. We have a growing dealer base of loyal and dedicated dealers that promote our products.
“From start to finish they’re built in about two weeks, which includes the foundation,” he continued. “We’re rather unique in that we do all the assembly in our facility. We build our rooms to exact tolerances in a climate-controlled environment. Most sunrooms are constructed from pieces in customer’s back gardens, so we take a lot of the risk away for the homeowner, which is paying dividends for us because our installers can come install it in the room, not cutting and chopping things on the site.”
Sunrooms can range in price from $20,000 to $100,000 depending on size, specifications, performance, and taste. According to Francis, the only limit is a customer’s imagination and budget, although most cost an average of $35,000-$50,000.
“We do studio sunrooms, cathedral sunrooms, and we do conservatory systems, which is a very ornate European-style conservatory that’s very popular in Europe,” he said. “So we have many different styles of products that we manufacture in our facility.
“Our customers don’t typically need the space, but they want a room to enjoy,” he continued. “They want to bring the outside indoors. They want to feel like they’re outside. They want a lot of glass, and they want to enjoy the view. A lot of times, usually for family get-togethers, relaxing, or enjoying the evenings, they quickly become the focal point of a person’s home. The most regular comment we get from homeowners is that they wish they had done it sooner.”
According to Francis, LivingSpace Sunrooms heavily promotes an eco-green system, and has pioneered the use of structural insulated panels (SIP).
“It’s 100% recyclable, and they’re considered less waste compared to traditional, stick framing,” he said. “That means less waste into the landfill. They’re totally sealed, they produce no chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) or hydrofluorocarbons (HCFCs). We use those for the roofing, walling, and floors, and that creates a very warm core in our sunroom. So, we have a beautiful room that performs incredibly well and surpasses anything that’s been available in the past. We’re right to the cutting edge of technology, and being a smaller company and growing business, we’re able to adapt. In my opinion, there is no more technologically advanced company than ours in creating sunrooms for the American public.”
LivingSpace Sunrooms was established in 1994, applied for its first patent in 1999, and continues to use that patented technology on its key system. According to Francis, the rooms it builds far surpass the energy guidelines for wind load, snow load, and structure requirements, which means they meet Florida State building approvals and can build rooms in hurricane zones.
“Most sunrooms that are in the marketplace, like Four Seasons Sunrooms and others like it, are direct competitors of ours,” he said. “They’re using systems that they developed 20-30 years ago, and that’s the technology they have. We’re the first company that designed their systems in the late 90s or early 2000s, so we’re really the cutting edge. Most sunrooms were built of aluminum because they wanted the structure that would carry the weight of the room, so they were very limited with the options that they could use. They often could only do certain size windows, and of course aluminum has to be joined together, so they typically do that by putting screws all over the room. It almost looks like rivets on an RV or a trailer.
“We started from the ground up,” he continued. “We make all of our parts out of vinyl extrusion, and all of our aluminum or fiberglass is inside the extrusion – it’s not visible to the human eye. You get a very clean look on our rooms. It’s seamless and it’s all custom. Everything’s symmetrical and everything is lined up. We’re using a lot of different technology. The reason it works so well is we’re using the same quality replacement windows as you would put in your own home. We combine the finest vinyl windows with the SIP’s green roofing and flooring technology, and we create a really warm-core building envelope. Once people taste what we do and see what we do, they’re in it for life.”
Francis said that the company’s number one interest is the homeowners it serves, which is why LivingSpace Sunrooms will not let a contractor buy, quote, or sell the product until it has been certified.
“We insist that, if you want to become one of our dealers, you must make the commitment to come for training not just once, but continuously,” he said. “We also go further than that – when dealers are set up, we actually drop in and visit sites and audit the performance of our dealers. We visit the rooms that they’re building, sometimes unannounced.”
LivingSpace Sunrooms looks forward to continued growth due mainly to the referrals of satisfied customers.
“Our referrals and references are phenomenal,” said Francis. “Our biggest challenge this year is to grow awareness of LivingSpace. We’ve grown up to now mostly through referrals. The people selling our products know a lot of people in the same business, and they refer us. So we’ve grown strongly. We’re just going to embark this year on a lot more PR because we’re poised, and we’re ready, and we have the capacity to support a lot more dealers than we currently have. So, it’s been very rewarding.”
For more information, please visit livingspacesunrooms.com.