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MARKET INSIGHT: SHOWROOMS Bill Simone, president of El Segundo, Calif.-based Custom Design & Construction, prefers to call the space where meets with clients a design center, but for many years he didn���t have a full blown, visible showroom. get-togethers to encourage them to bring their spouses in for a presentation. Custom Design & Construction makes the facility, which has a full working kitchen, available to some area catering companies to do cooking demonstrations. Neighboring corporations also hold teambuilding events from time to time. The fee for using the facility is nominal, but it brings additional exposure to the designbuild firm, Simone says. No Clutter Dino Tonn of the new design center, one of those consequences being a significant amount of walk-in traffic. El Segundo may be a small town, but it swells by 150,000 people a day from people who work in the major corporations surrounding Custom Design & Construction. Two days each week, Simone says, he allows upscale catering trucks to park in the firm���s driveway, generating a lot of foot traffic. In addition, Custom Design & lunching alfresco at the lunch trucks. ���We thought we would have to rely on our traditional marketing efforts, and [the new design center] would be a destination location,��� Simone says. ���It turns out, although we still use traditional marketing, that���s just not the case.��� Like Normandy Remodeling, Simone stages events and seminars for homeowners, usually on a monthly basis, tailing off toward the end of the year and the holi- ���You won���t see a tower of quartz countertop samples or door styles hanging on the wall. ��� ���Bill Simone, Custom Design & Construction Construction is located on a street leading to a major thoroughfare that is home to bricks-and-mortar eateries for those not 22 February 2013 QR ForResidentialPros.com days. In addition, he foresees smaller events for executives of the nearby corporations ��� mini-seminars or lunch-and-learn The design center isn���t cluttered with product samples. ���You won���t see a tower of quartz countertop samples or door styles hanging on the wall. All that stuff is pushed back into the inner workings of the design stations. As parts and pieces of a project are selected by our designers, they���re brought into the conference room where we meet with the client so patrons are not overwhelmed with decisions ��� and also so they understand that you can���t walk in and say, ���I want to buy this faucet.��� That���s not what we���re all about,��� Simone explains. The design center is just under 3,000 sq. ft. and contains a dozen vignettes: five kitchens, four bathrooms, a home office, a home library and a living/family room. Updating displays is an expensive proposition, and like Normandy, Simone favors enduring designs. ���We have some pretty talented design people here, and the materials that we selected are pretty timeless,��� he says. As noted earlier, one kitchen is a full working kitchen, ���so it will get some wear and tear. We figure it has a three- to four-year life span. On the other displays, we might get a little more time because the materials were purposely chosen to be timeless,��� he says. Asked for his advice to remodelers envi-