It was 7 AM and I had just pulled into a small parking lot next to an office building in Thousand Oaks, CA. It had been a beautiful ride filled with views of mountains and greenery in this pretty town, but I was still a little too groggy from waking up before dawn to really appreciate it. Armed with my favorite venti flat white, I walked into the building and entered the new Holwick office where I was to meet with our peerhatch installers.
“Good morning! I’m James,” a young guy in a blue trucker hat greeted me. “I work for Holwick.”
“I’m with the Metropolitan West and peerhatch marketing department,” I introduced myself, failing to match his level of energy and wondering why I had ever considered myself an early bird.
Do all contractors start working at the crack of dawn? I had expected to be the first person on site and to have to wait around for everybody else to show up, which was the way it had always been for me. However, James wasn’t the only one who beat me to it that day. Loreto and our team of installers were already there, chatting and preparing to apply the first peerhatch wall covering of the day.
“So you’re going to take pictures?” he asked.
“And some videos,” I said. “Get ready for your close-up!”
We laughed, and Loreto went back to the crew. There were four of them and ten wall coverings to install. It seemed like a lot, so I prepared for a long day. My mission was not just to take photos. I wanted to see what is called the MetWest Advantage with my own eyes. It was one thing to hear and talk about it in the office, but I wanted to know what those words meant in the field, first hand.
VIDEO: ON THE JOB
I also wanted to see how clients used peerhatch, how they interacted with a full writable dry-erase wall, how the graphic element came into play – and their reaction on how easy it was to clean without any ghosting.
It wasn’t easy to follow the team around, each had their own task. One installer was sorting out the pieces of wall coverings and putting them in the rooms where they belonged, the other was covering them with a sticky solution, and two guys were busy applying them to the walls. I noticed Loreto exchanging jokes with James as if they were old friends.
“I’ve known these guys for a long time,” Loreto told me. “That’s their new office. I’ve been to the old one many times.”
Meanwhile, Holwick’s new office was filling up with peerhatch room by room. The pair of installers was working quickly and smoothly, even under my camera’s watchful eye, which tends to make people nervous. The pieces of peerhatch were coming together seamlessly, and it looked a bit like magic to me. The duo was using a laser plumb bob for perfect alignment and cutting the excess of material like it was the easiest task in the world.
“Very cool!” James exclaimed, looking at freshly installed peerhatch featuring the Avenue of the Stars pedestrian overpass. “This bridge is in Century City,” he explained. “We built this bridge years and years ago when the company first started, and now it’s an iconic part of it.”
I couldn’t help but smile widely at the fact that my company was able to place a piece of Holwick’s history on their conference room wall… and make that piece writable. I left the office and came back with another flat white and a pack of dry-erase markers.
VIDEO: TESTIMONIAL
“Want to try it?” I asked James handing him the markers, barely able to hide my impatient eagerness.
“Of course!”
He took the marker and wrote “Holwick” on peerhatch wall covering.
“That is very, very cool!” he repeated before erasing the word and making it disappear without a trace. “So you guys do a lot of this stuff?”
“It’s actually one of our new products,” I said.
“Oh, this is all new?” he sounded surprised.
No wonder, I thought. The installers were working like they had spent a couple of decades applying peerhatch to walls.
“It’s about a year old.”
“This is awesome. We used to do paint before, like dry erase paint. But it doesn’t work as well as this. I love it!” James smiled.
“It’s pretty unique,” I replied with a laugh, feeling proud for Metropolitan West and peerhatch.
Yes, sir. We’re marketing some pretty fantastic products.
One by one, the offices of Holwick’s executive team and project managers were transformed, thanks to peerhatch and Loreto’s crew. I had been ready to spend long hours taking pictures of the project in process, but the process turned out to be much shorter than I’d expected. The team was done right about lunchtime. The ten walls they had finished looked incredible.
Everybody seemed genuinely pleased. James was happy with how his company’s new office was turning out. Loreto and his crew were satisfied with the results of their job. I was pleased with all of it too. I couldn’t wait to write about it, share pictures on all our social media channels and to create a video of the project install to give it justice. But most of all, I was excited to see the MetWest Advantage with my own eyes.
I left feeling like I was a part of something special. We are all in this together: designers, architects, and contractors. We help our clients, and we help each other, becoming a part of each other’s history. We’re a big family with a shared goal of creating something that matters, shapes the world and makes it safer, more efficient – and surely better looking.
VIDEO: HATCHING WITH PEERHATCH