Cast Polymer Grabs Opportunity in Niche Market

Marbleon and Gruber teamed to create the MasterCast ADA Bowl.

A new bowl by Gruber and Marbleon, in collaboration with architect firm Reese, Lower, Patrick and Scott (RLPS), is designed for the niche market of ADA accessibility. The MasterCast ADA Bowl is the first item branded with the marketing group’s MasterCast name.

Chris Hurdleston, president of Leola,Pa.-based Marbleon, says the product addresses concerns the architect had about the height issue. “For someone in a wheelchair, normal vanity tops are too high, so they wanted them lowered,” he says. “With existing bowls that we use, the top of the surface to the bottom is seven inches, so they can’t lower it because the bowl is too deep. Someone can’t roll in using a wheelchair. Instead, they’d have to take the vanity and put it so high in order to roll under it, but it almost maxes out on the maximum height for an ADA vanity.”

It’s at this juncture where Gruber enters the picture. The Valencia, Calif.-based manufacturer recently unveiled a flat oval bowl measuring an inch and a half deep on the inside and three inches deep top to bottom. Gruber and Marbleon presented the new Oval to RLPS and they said, “It’s too contemporary and not deep enough for a retirement community environment,” said Hurdleston. “So we asked them what they were looking for, and they gave us a very detailed drawing. The two companies began conversing and came up with the concept of creating a bowl that was shallow with integral overflow.

The development process took approximately six months and was full of back-and-forth developments between RLPS doing preliminary sketches and Gruber’s CAD drawings. Between the three organizations, the drawings were constantly circulated with new improvements.

Coming up with a final design for this element proved to be one of the biggest obstacles. “The more the architect found we were willing to go outside the box on this, the more they pushed us to come up with unique aspects of design,” said Hurdleston. In addition to the height improvement, the bowl also features hand grabs on the sides for patrons needing to pull themselves to the vanity.

A critical factor was positioning the overflow. Typically, the part is manufactured underneath the sink; however, this would conflict with the need to get a wheelchair rolled underneath. “The firm preferred that it be in the back or the side, and we couldn’t do that and still meet the requirements. So we created an internal overflow which doesn’t interfere with the depth of the vanity top,” said Hurdleston.

During the process, Hurdleston says the architects were surprised at the industry’s capabilities. When presented with a prototype out of ACS granite filler with a two-tone bowl, the architects thought it was a solid surface top. “It was a great education process because they think they know what cultured marble is, but there’s a lack of education, and we blew them away with these new implementations,” he says.

Hurdleston says the perception of cast polymer’s viability dogged them from the beginning of the process. “The architect often did custom Corian pieces which were brutally expensive, but they fit the design,” he says. “The Corian fabricators told them it had to be done out of solid surface because you can’t fabricate something like this. We just proved them wrong.”

Hurdleston remarked that manufacturers need to revisit with their architects and come up with a program of what the industry can really do to improve its standing. Though he had worked with RLPS before, it wasn’t until the opportunity arose to contribute a unique design that they saw the industry differently. “In my opinion, a lot of the architects believe we are an inferior product, and all we do is white-on-white standard sizes,” he said. “A re-education of our existing customer base needs to happen. That doesn’t involve just handing out some color samples. It’s coming to the table with a variety of different things we do, not just refreshing samples that are three years old.”

The bowl has already been used in a large-scale fashion. National Lutheran Communities in a nursing facility in Rockville, Md., has ordered 300 models to be installed in their facility. “The architects do a lot of work with retirement communities and are always looking for new ideas and new ways of doing things,” he says. “They spearheaded the effort to get in something that was less expensive but met the needs of what their customer was looking for, which was ADA accessibility.”