How Tanglewood Conservatories began…
Someone recently asked me to describe how Tanglewood Conservatories was started. I related the following story about our first conservatory project.
I was in the Washington DC area in the business of supplying local home builders with prefabricated sunrooms and skylights. We worked at this with some degree of success until the real estate market imploded in 1990. After that happened, we targeted our work to home improvement contractors at which time the size and complexity of the projects began to increase dramatically.
That was when one of our clients showed us a picture of a conservatory and asked if we could build one. This led us into the world of conservatories. We searched for a supplier but were unable to find someone who offered a product that was of the quality we wanted. So, we decided to build it ourselves.
The first conservatory, the one with the green interior on our website, went surprisingly well. When a second customer asked for one, we started to think we could make a business out of this specialized niche.
We had some very skilled carpenters and much of the work on the first one was done on site since we only had a very small wood shop at the time. One of the challenges was how to use the standard sized windows that we bought from a local distributor to produce the very custom looking conservatory that we had designed. This required quite a bit of creatively. For example, we had to come up with a method of adding spacer blocks in certain places so that things would line up just right—something that has always been very important to us.
And of course the trim details were difficult to get right because we didn’t have the flexibility to make all the modifications to the woodwork as we do now.
The frustrations of having to work within the bounds of someone else’s standardized product, is what has led us in to all the custom manufacturing that we do today. From making our own specialty windows and doors, to the highly custom copper work that we do, to the special techniques we use for making our insulated glass, all of these items were originally outsourced, but were eventually taken in house because we found that it was the only way we could have complete control over the design, the scheduling and the quality of the product.
That original job turned out to be spectacular, the customer was VERY happy and Tanglewood Conservatories was begun.
Alan
