Stark bidding is very competitive now and owners seem a little weary of getting things started here in California due to the state of the economy and the federal election. Stark’s thoughts on the future are to continue consulting with my company’s key personnel. We’ve made it through the good times and bad over the last 31 years and the company is still going strong.
Eric Stark Interiors has come a long way since Eric Stark founded the company in 1993 in San Jose, California. When Dan Lilly came aboard 26 years ago a job for $100,000 would be considered “massive for us.” Today, the company’s annual business volume ranges from $25 to $30 million for exterior and interior wall and ceiling work.
“I would have never imagined that we would be doing the jobs we’re doing now,” says Lilly who is vice president, chief operation officer and close to founder Stark. “It is an exciting time for us because we’ve grown so much.”
Custom drywall and fiberglass ceilings and soffits represent a share of the contractor’s work in and around San Jose today. While some jobs are straightforward, others are complicated. A good example of the latter is an elder care facility operated by NEMS (North East Medical Services) underway in an East San Jose neighborhood.
The center’s grand interior space features landscaping that will help define “a park-like setting,” says Lilly. “The whole space is rounded like the shape of a lagoon but it also radiuses in the opposite direction, turning upward.”
The scope of work includes the installation of numerous radiused walls and Glass Fiber Reinforced Gypsum (GFRG) soffits “radiused in both directions.” A large central skylight highlights a dozen 20-foot-tall fluted columns shaped “something like trumpets.” The columns are roughly 10-feet wide at the top and two-feet at the base. Each is comprised of six to eight segments. Assembled on site, the prefabricated GFRG segments are secured to a metal stud frame supported on a tube steel vessel.
Lilly says getting the design right took “a back-and-forth process” between the architect, IA Interior Architects and the prefabricator, Armstrong GC Products. “Everything, even the joints, had to be precise before they were approved by the architect for fabrication.”
Installation involved a winch supported on the inside of the roof. A Stark crew guided each column into place using scissor lifts. “We have never done any GFRG jobs this big or this complex before.”
To provide space for utilities above ceilings in the “giant mezzanine,” which encompasses most of the building’s interior, Stark installed a drop ceiling from the inside of the roof deck at an elevation of 26-feet to 14-feet above grade. “Everything is a structural wall with a structural ceiling and plywood above it,” says Lilly. Structural shearwalls are clad in Series 200 Sureboard.
As the spans in the mezzanine are up to 30 feet, the supporting steel frame had to be 10-14-gauge. “Some joists were up to 16-inches wide for box beams. It was massive stuff going up.” Stark was restricted to using a forklift for installation because of the confined working space.
Most of the interior walls and ceilings of the medical facility are specified to a Level 5 finish. The work involves putty coating the entire surface to “a glassy smooth finish.” Level 5 finishes are typically specified where surfaces are exposed to intense lighting or are covered with high sheen paints.
The medical project has required a crew ranging from 20 to 40 during peak periods. Normally a project of this size (about 50,000 square feet) would require “way less materials and labor” and the job would price out at $1 million tops. Stark’s contract, however, is about $3 million. “It is a very expensive building for materials and labor,” says Lilly, noting the job is ahead of schedule and Stark expects to complete the final phase early in 2025.
Meeting contract schedules is a high priority at Stark and achieving that comes from good report with the GC Hillhouse Construction Co.
A memorable specialty ceiling job for Eric L. Stark, son of the company’s owner Eric Stark, was the Apple Infinite Loop Auditorium in Cupertino. Suspended from a Rigid Lock T-bar grid, are acoustic ceiling panels (USG Ensemble Acoustical Drywall Ceiling). To achieve a high noise reduction coefficient, the drywall panels have tiny perforations underneath the sheetrock’s paper surface.
“We could only use a certain-sized knife to tape the joints and spotting the screws had to be minimal so we didn’t cover up the (sound-absorbing) perforations,” says Stark, who is the company’s vice president.
Prior to commencing the work, the walls were framed, sheet rocked, taped and finished and then the T-bar grid was installed. Painters then finished the walls and Stark followed with the ceiling installation. The crew then masked the walls and sprayed the mud/paint ceiling recipe in prescripted layers. “The overall project in general wasn’t a big job but it was complicated and took a long time.”
The contractor, which has done other jobs with a similar product (Acoustibuilt) from another manufacturer (Armstrong) also required training to achieve certification from the manufacturers to use their products.
The younger Stark was on the tools for the contractor in 2008 and took his first job in the office as estimator and project manager in 2012. He’s tackled a number of complicated jobs since then, including the AirBnB offices recently in Santa Clara, California. The project, which netted general contractor NOVO Construction an award for the interiors by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, features a large circular-shaped lobby in a 28-foot high space. The scope involved the installation of wood slat walls on a heavy gauge structural frame with “huge box headers and radiused soffits” at openings.
The contract hit several unexpected problems requiring innovation solutions. A case in point is the addition of a “double radiused low wall further set into the space” to attach anchor points because the original anchor points specified at the edge of the room were causing the slab to break. “We put anchors on the low wall and then braced back to the edge of the slab,” says Stark.
There was another problem with the original design that Stark had to iron out. “The details showed us building a soffit from the top of the glazing to the deck but we couldn’t attach it to the deck because the framing needed to land in between the exterior panel and the edge of the slab.” Shooting the wall with shot pins (powder-actuated fasteners) was “blowing out the interior of the panel,” so Stark proposed using Tapcon screws, which were approved by the architect and structural engineer.
Stark takes pride in another job for law firm Foley & Lardner LLP in Palo Alto, which presented challenges from the start, including cutting down drywall to fit into elevators for work on the 5th and 6th floors. That added more taping time to the schedule which the crew was able to maintain. There were complex ceiling framing specifications such as four metal stud drops instead of the usual two were required for each soffit because a stud support was specified on each side of the linear diffusers, the returns, supplies and lights, all soffits were required to have anchor bolt supports as well. “It was a maze of metal framing,” Stark points out, adding “a tricky radius ceiling” in the lobby took time for the crew to layout and install as well.
The contractor has started construction of two of four wall and ceiling contracts for Cadence Design Systems, a high-tech company with a multi-building campus in San Jose. The contracts call for remodeling two 75,000 square foot buildings. While the jobs are not as complex as others recently, they present challenges, including novel features such as two-story green living walls. To support the walls, Stark is using six-inch, 16-gauge metal stud framing sheeted with fire-treated ¾-inch plywood.
Cadence’s campus buildings also feature cloud ceilings supported over long spans. They are comprised of 5/8-inch drywall suspended on a heavy-duty T-bar ceiling system called Rigid Lock. “It works great for areas where you have really long spans, areas which would be difficult to do using metal studs,” explains Lilly. In some cases, the installation includes a finished trim with soffits, accented by lighting.
The job requires about 40-50 workers, he says, noting that to keep a steady pace, Stark has framers assigned to some sections of the building while sheetrock installers work in another and tapers elsewhere. While the bulk of the contract calls for Level 4 finishes, walls with reveals or graphics are Level 5.
Prior to the pandemic Stark operated with upwards of 200 workers but it now runs a steady crew of 70-80. It is affiliated with Drywall Lathers union Local 9144 in San Jose, but Stark employs others from locals throughout the San Francisco Bay area.
Lilly says many of its workers have 20 years of experience with the company. He is confident the firm will be busy next year through jobs lined up within a 100-mile radius of San Jose. A number of K12 and college jobs coming could involve new acoustic products that could be installed and difficult to accurately price.
Lilly, who has been in construction for more than 35 years, says Stark has several car dealership remodeling jobs on tap. Sloping gypsum soffits and clouds are among the challenges. Another is that often the dealerships are required to stay open while work is going on so temporary facilities are constructed or only half a dealership is built at a time, says Lilly. “Phasing can be a bit of a challenge.”
Company owner Stark says that custom ceiling jobs are not as common as they once were. He suggests it might be because many developers are putting their money into other aspects of their projects. “They might be saving their money to make the deal.”
He says bidding is “very competitive” now and owners seem “a little weary of getting things started here in California due to the state of the economy and the coming federal election. “My thoughts on the future are to continue consulting with my company’s key personnel. We’ve made it through the good times and bad over the last 31 years and the company is still going strong.”
Lilly says the company’s success starts with Stark’s business philosophies. “Eric is an honest guy, who treats his workers with respect and really cares about all his workers and their families. We work hard here to keep the work coming in and keep our employees busy. That’s a big part of being successful.”
Don Procter is a freelance writer in Ontario, Canada.
