We’re excited here at Markraft by a project that we think our customers will appreciate: a brand-new showroom that will let us display a broader, more up-to-date range of today’s best kitchen and bathroom design ideas.

By January 2015, we expect to have that expanded space open next to our main offices on Castle Creek Lane, just off Castle Hayne Road in the Wrightsboro neighborhood. This 3,500-square-foot display area will be 50 percent bigger than our existing Selection Center at 5424 Oleander Drive. That extra space will make it easier for us to display entire kitchen and bath layouts, and show the full range of cabinetry, countertops and other design touches we offer.

This will bring all of our customer-relations functions back under one roof for the first time in 15 years. Now the designers who most directly interact with our retail, homeowner customers will be just steps away from the rest of our sales, accounting and support staff.

The present Selection Center on Oleander Drive has always been a great location for us, but our designers will have more resources at their fingertips, to better serve our customers, in the new showroom.

From our customers’ point of view, we think the new showroom has some other advantages. For example, for the growing number of homeowners we serve in Brunswick County who would be coming across the river, our Castle Hayne Road location is just a short distance off both the Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway and the Outer Loop freeway. Customers in New Hanover and Pender counties can get to us just as easily from those two highways.

Our business has always served two main customer categories. Our existing Selection Center, and the new showroom, are intended for homeowners: people who are looking to create a unique, customized design for their remodeled kitchens and bathrooms. While our other types of customers, the homebuilding contractors and apartment developers, may not use the showroom as often as the retail customer, the space will provide the entire range of products that we offer to meet all of our customer’s needs. The Design Center space will be built to make the shopping experience a pleasure and provide all of the necessary information and visualization for all types of customers.

The other group of customers, the homebuilding contractors and apartment developers, don’t really use our showroom. They interact with us more on the warehouse-and-sales-office level. But the showroom will still include our entire range of products. This will benefit a homebuilder’s own customers who might want to get a better idea of what to expect from their kitchens or baths as their houses are being built.

In many ways, this change will help bring Markraft’s business back to the way we operated for many years. Creation of the Selection Center on Oleander Drive was the result of a natural disaster – a hurricane in 2000 that flooded our old showroom and forced us to relocate to a rented building. Over the years, as the economy has fluctuated, how we use that space has changed, as well.

So now, as we’re making an investment in our own space, we are looking forward to many new opportunities. We’ll be helping our customers visualize the broadest range of available products, helping our entire staff work more effectively together, and making best use of our company’s real estate, too.

I’ll have more to say about the new facility when it’s time for a grand opening. In the meantime, the current Selection Center is open and our designers are ready to help customers at 5424 Oleander Drive. 

I’m always happy to answer any questions about what we can do for you, whether in your home or for your business. Watch for more tips about how to enhance your home’s value and convenience!

Cee Edwards is President and General Manager of Markraft Cabinets. He joined the company in 1995. Since 1985, Markraft has specialized in cabinet and countertop design and installation in residential and commercial construction and custom remodeling. To learn more about Markraft, go to www.markraft.com. Contact Cee at 910-762-1986. Like Markraft on Facebook at www.facebook.com/markraftcabinets or follow Cee on Twitter at twitter.com/CeeEdwards.