NeoCon begins today and we are excited to be participating this year alongside OmniDecor, our Italian glass partner. If you are at the show, please come by and see us. We are on the eighth floor in booth 3134d and would very much like to introduce you to our revolutionary glass product, SoftEtch.
Below are a few more shots of our booth as we were getting set-up. We are featuring a variety of products, designs and textures. Come and see some of the product shots on the in-booth iPad to help get a sense of what these fantastic materials would look like in your finished applications.
Comment here and tell us what you think or connect with us on twitter @efi_us.
If you are looking for a stylish storage solution with big visual impact that won’t make you over budget, consider EFI’s Box Milano Tambour kits now available in on-trend aluminum. With our tambour kits, it’s a breeze to transform existing or newly constructed open storage spaces into sophisticated storage bins for the kitchen, multi-media room and more.
We know how tough it can be to find the right product in the right size for your interior design project—you’ve told us and we’ve listened. So, we’ve made sure our tambour kits are compatible with the widest range of cabinets…including those with the hardest-to-fit openings and measurements.
Space saving, customizable and easy-to-use, our tambour kits come in a new aluminum finish along with stainless steel in a variety of standard colors, including natural, white and black, and designs, including perforated, matte, brushed, mill and satin.
With our U.S. based manufacturing (right at our North Carolina headquarters), our quick-turn custom orders always reflect the highest quality materials, processes and products. And, with color coordinated system components, easy-to-install cartridge counterbalances and a true metallic finish, our space-saving tambour system complements (or replaces!) traditional cabinet doors.
So, dust off your latest designs and get inspired! We hope you’ll agree our new aluminum finish instantly refreshes any contemporary interior.
This installation video shows just how easy it is to make the Box Milano Tambour part of your project.
We received the latest and greatest photos our glass offerings this week and I thought it might be fun to share some of them here. They are all fantastic in their own right, but I have a special affinity for some of the new designs (or patterns). Our glass partner, Omni Decor, teams up with prominent European designers about every other year to come up with new, fresh options.
The DecorGem colored options seem to have caught on the fastest, particular with the use of the Ice White Clear glass as a markerboard material. But we see big things for this glass in our market. See something you like? Comment here to let us know.
OBM International recently finished a residential project on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. The kitchen in this contemporary-style european home features stainless steel tambour doors from EFI. These doors are a fantastic solution for applications requiring easily accessible concealed space and sleek styling.
While we are excited to be part of this project and think that the doors look great, what is most striking is the setting in which this home was placed and how this design takes such great advantage of them. The views are incredible and so is the craftsmanship. If anyone is looking for an upscale primary or vacation residence in the Virgin Islands, you should really check this place out.
Additional applications of this product, available in custom sizes, are provided in our Kitchen and Bath Showroom.
Congratulations to the folks at OBM! Really well done.
Bringing jobs to the US has always been one of our goals.
Several years ago, there were over 50,000 European Kitchens sold in the state of Florida. From the beginning, our vision has been to provide the American Manufacturer a chance to compete with the European companies. We have done this by travelling to Italy and Germany to the various trade shows as well as visiting our vendors on a regular basis. This has allowed us to discover trends that are fresh and current in Europe and fast forward them to the US. After all, a box is a box – it’s what you do to it or set on it that sets your project apart.
We produce doors, but we also import high quality functional hardware and LED lighting systems to accessorize our clients’ American cabinet or furniture offerings. We began by importing our doors. After a few years and more air freight bills than you would care to hear about, we established our manufacturing facility in Kernersville, NC. You got it. Our doors are made in the USA.
Bringing fresh ideas to the US market while keeping jobs stateside continues to be our goal. This is good for us and it is good for you. It allows us all to compete in a market demanding custom-sizes and short lead times.
Innovative design and quality product are what we all demand of ourselves. Thank you for allowing us to be a small part of your team.
One of the most innovative materials we have had the pleasure of working with this year has been glass markerboard. An idea originally brought to us by one of our commercial office customers, it has become a mainstay of some EFI products.
Ice White Clear glass is probably one of the top two or three choices as an insert material in our doors and drawer fronts. Our glass markerboard solution is simply the Ice White Clear glass (usually the 4 mm thick variety) with a thin gauge steel sheet adhered to the back. This combination of materials results in a magnetized product that can accept markings by either a dry erase marker or a Sharpie. Dry erase markings are easily wiped off with an eraser. Markings made by a Sharpie have a little more staying power. They can be removed from the face of the glass, but you do so with the aid of a cleaning product (like Windex).
Glass markerboard has some significant advantages over traditional centurion markerboard. Have you ever encountered residual markings on traditional markerboard? Someone else's notes, or perhaps your own, stick around long after they are gone - like a ghost reminding us of the past. This does not happen with glass. As a more rigid, less porous material, the dry erase ink does not find its way into the deep recesses of the material where it commonly likes to hide. Because the ink stays out of the product, it holds its aesthetic value for a significantly longer period of time. Because you are able to use a Sharpie on the glass, markings that you want to have longer life can be made less temporary. For instance, you have a long term project plan that you need to keep track of. Or you have his and her to-do lists that are perpetually being changed. Or maybe you just want to draw a pretty picture without risking the possibility of someone quickly removing it. Beauty. Durability. Flexibility. It's all here.
We were recently featured in an article by Architectural Record speaking to the increasing popularity of glass as an aesthetic choice in the architectural community. The author does a fantastic job of addressing the fact that, historically, the primary role of glass in exterior applications was to remain "invisible" so as not to detract from the beauty of the architectural design itself. Recently, modern architecture has begun to feature a much more attractive and versatile brand of glass in these projects.
The partnership of EFI with Omni Decor makes the architectural glass so popular in many of the newest European projects available to the North American market. You can browse some great examples of these in our glass showroom. Here is a short video that provides a little more insight on the subject as well.
We would love to hear what ideas you have for the application of glass in modern architecture.
"Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future." Charles Kettering
