365 Days of Surfaces + Light
In 365 days, our team has accomplished many things both personally and professionally. A growing office family and increasingly challenging projects kept us on our toes, which is just how we like it. Looking back, here are the major project highlights from this year that really stood out for us:
1. One Lake’s Edge
Three words: Double. Mitered. Corners. This graceful soaring wall isn’t just comprised of the obvious front panels. No, the backlit honey onyx on this stunning feature wraps the returns, and then winds onto the back – a simple move when drawing a few extra lines in a floor plan, but a totally different story in person. Double miters in backlit onyx are difficult to fabricate, nerve-wracking to ship, and extremely fickle to install. Luckily our detailed shop drawings nailed all of the relationships, so our install team kicked it into high gear to follow those parameters and keep the install running smoothly. These corners are a feat in themselves.
2. Ocean Prime
The backlit wood bar walls had a stringent completion date for the high-profile restaurant opening. Even though the wood is sanded to the thickness of a fingernail, it’s a challenging surface to illuminate as we react to natural graining and pattern densities. (Mother Nature has been known to throw us some curve balls!) This project was heavy on the installation side, both literally and figuratively. We had to evaluate each piece in full scale in order to tailor the lighting to it. And then our install team had to lift these extremely fragile and humongous panels – some spanning 10 feet long – setting them in place with only millimeters of room for play. Not to mention, this installation fell right after the One Lake’s Edge wall above, so our crews had to be uber-prepared to ship all the right customization materials out months in advance.
3. The Mansions at Acqualina
Although picking a favorite project is almost like picking a favorite child, this project was arguably our crown jewel for the year. Custom sourcing the onyx involved some long days and dusty trips in the quarries. A challenging ceiling suspension system, designed to visually disappear and meet strict seismic requirements, kept our team very busy during the engineering phase. The work was so worth the reward as the designers and owners came to cherish the backlit onyx feature as much as we do.
We discuss our integrated process often, and it’s easy to simplify it into neat phases of design, engineering, fabrication, and installation. But on a true day to day basis, what did it take to get there?
- Countless team meetings
- Over 400 hours of overtime work during our installs
- 95,000 frequent flyer miles
- Tens of thousands of coordination emails
- Hundreds of conference calls
- Approximately 10,000 cups of coffee (Santa brought us a new Keurig machine!)
Looking into 2015, we’re already filling up schedules with high profile projects, including a high rise tower in Philadelphia, commercial building in D.C., and an office complex in Boston. We’ll be able to share more of those details once we are deeper into the projects, so stay tuned to our blog and Instagram feed for sneak peeks (both will be highly featured on our new website debuting in a few weeks).
Cheers to fresh opportunities as we ring in the New Year! We will be back in the office tomorrow, gearing up for yet another 365 days that are sure to fly by.