Seamless Execution In Sterling | For one company, Corian is way more than countertops
For many years, DuPont Corian has become a very popular material for countertops and tabletops. I didn’t know until visiting Sterling Surfaces that it was a plastic material that can be heated up and molded into almost any shape imaginable.
The Sterling Surfaces business also includes a division called Kitchen Associates, which as you might expect, designs and installs kitchens that feature Corian and other so-called “solid surface” materials.
You wouldn’t expect that the guys inside the unassuming building on a quiet stretch of road not far from Interstate 190 in Sterling are manufacturing some truly far-out stuff, but they are.
According to Grant Garcia, the company’s managing director, Sterling Surfaces has become the beneficiary of some serious envelope-pushing by architects, and by DuPont and LG, which makes a solid surface material similar to Corian called HiMacs.
Formed And Reformed
Founder Robert Sponenberg started the company selling and installing kitchens from his car in the 1950s and moved to warehouse space, garage space and eventually to its present location in the 1980s.
The 79-year-old Sponenberg still puts in 40 hours per week.
It was only in 2004, though, that the company’s fabrication work started to take off, especially after manufacturing 24 wildly shaped Corian chairs now in Grand Central Station in New York City.
“They wanted something that was as durable as Corian, but they didn’t know it could be shaped like that,” Garcia said. The oversized red- and green-colored chairs are located on the bottom floor of Grand Central and offer weary travels a place to rest.
The chairs “opened up architects’ perception of what you could do with what they thought was just a flat surface. Not that we’re the first people who have ever thermo-formed Corian, but we have pushed the envelope,” Garcia said.
The Grand Central chairs put Sterling Surfaces on a path that has led to the fabrication of high-end corporate office furniture.
The company’s relationships with architects has also been noticed by DuPont and LG, both of which have started design competitions for architecture students with the prize being production of the winning design by Sterling Surfaces.
Material Matters
But Corian and other solid surfaces are also very, very practical.
For one thing, it’s completely impervious, which in addition to being suitable for kitchens and bathrooms, is ideal for hospitals and other health care applications.
The company won a design award recently for the scrub sinks it fabricated for the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
The impervious surface combined with Sterling’s ability to construct almost anything without seams makes for sinks that do not harbor bacteria or other nasty stuff.
Lately, the company has been working with Phillips, the health care electronics manufacturer, on entire “environments” for MRI rooms intended to reduce the sense of claustrophobia experienced by many patients.
“We’re trying to figure out how hospitals can build inexpensive inpatient rooms,” Garcia said.
“We think they can save money by cutting infection risk. If it works, we’ll be the only company in the U.S. making this product,” he said of a new design being tested by the shop.
Got news for our Industrial Strength column? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com
Watch as Grant Garcia explains how the company stays on the cutting edge:
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