California Stucco offering options to ‘sameness’ in construction design

Gregory Shaw, the 29-year-old General Manager of California Stucco believes that its arrival in Guyana, just under three years ago, has added a new and exciting dimension to the country’s design and building landscape at a time when the local construction sector is expanding at breakneck speed.

Shaw says that it is as much the growth in the housing sector and the desire of home-owners to make creative ‘statements’ through their new buildings as it is a breakthrough in high-rise edifices that has thrown open a potentially lucrative market for the company.

Stucco is one of myriad products of the unending search in the United States’ scientific and manufacturing sectors for niches in the multi-billion dollar and ever-growing construction sector. It is a fine plaster for interior and exterior walls, including mouldings—usually composed of cement, sand and lime—that offers both different options in ornamentation and, simultaneously, durability. The local company is a franchise of a Trinidad and Tobago parent company which, Shaw says, has found steady and encouraging acceptance on the local market. Charles Seecharran, the Trinidad and Tobago entrepreneur who owns California Stucco, Shaw asserts, is passionate about pursuits that make a difference to the quality of life in the Caribbean.

 

California Stucco  General Manager Gregory Shaw
California Stucco
General Manager Gregory Shaw

20150501Building1Shaw himself is keen to observe what he says is the unfolding significance of the products and services which the company offers to the local building sector. The company’s significance, he says, reposes in the creative options which it brings to the building sector and which, he says, is inducting Guyana into a construction design revolution.

He is quick to add that California Stucco is not trashing tradition. The company, he says, remains acutely aware that radical changes to a traditionally conservative building style resulting from interventions like Stucco run the risk of charges that Guyana’s architectural heritage is being compromised. He challenges the validity of any such charge, first, on the grounds that Stucco mouldings, which are manufactured to computer-measured specifications, can mimic the components of traditional Guyanese architecture so that building traditions can still be sustained through look-alikes. He goes beyond that, pointing out that what the California Stucco product offers homeowners is the opportunity to make timely and tasteful design departures from the monotony of sameness. “It allows people to express themselves through the structures that they create,” he says.

There is, Shaw says, more to California Stucco than style. The experience of the company, both here and in Trinidad and Tobago is that the tasteful design features which the product affords add value to buildings. More than that, he asserts that California Stucco mouldings have, in many instances, proven themselves to be far more durable than

Some examples of the flexibility in taste and style manifested in the dimension which California Stucco has brought to construction design in Guyana
Some examples of the flexibility in taste and style manifested in the dimension which California Stucco has brought to construction design in Guyana
This jaw-dropping Camp and Robb streets edifice is perhaps the biggest assignment undertaken locally so far by California Stucco
This jaw-dropping Camp and Robb streets edifice is perhaps the biggest assignment undertaken locally so far by California Stucco

some of the hand-made mouldings available in the construction sector. “Mouldings have been known to stand up for a lifetime. That is why we are confident in what they can do.”

Shaw says that as far as he is aware California Stucco is the only local company that offers a bona fide warranty on its stucco products.

As part of its plan to broaden the range of its services to the local building sector California Stucco is currently planning to introduce a new range of floor and wall products.

The incremental building of the company’s local profile is reflected in the growing mark that it continues to make on the construction sector.

There are, on the one hand, its various intimate encounters with homeowners whom it provides with opportunities to be creative and to live what they design. Commercial construction provides the company with a far more elaborate opportunity to parade its services on a much wider market. Not surprisingly, Shaw points to the imposing multi-storeyed Camp and Robb streets edifice atop which sits a huge TELEPERFORMANCE sign as perhaps its biggest billboard.

Costs associated the supply and installation of stucco are in the vicinity of $230 per square foot.

Those costs include the warranty provided by the company. Having started with a staff of four, Shaw says, California Stucco now has 25 employees. He says the increased number is consistent with a promise made to the Guyana Office for Investment (Go-Invest) that the company’s growth would embrace both employment-creation for Guyanese as well as training in career-shaping pursuits.

Staff at California Stucco are exposed to an initial three-month period of training which is undertaken by instructors brought here from the United States and Trinidad and Tobago. “Frankly, I would say that we are as much a training institution as a service institution, Shaw, a Pentecostal Pastor and former banking sector employee says.