Taking ceilings to new heights

[attach]3555[/attach]The beauty of stretch ceiling innovation was enough to convince Jack Verchenko to leave law enforcement and join the world of interior design.

Seeing a future in the lightweight PVC material that can be molded to any shape and attached over existing ceilings or walls, Jack Verchenko left his decade-long job as a Toronto police officer and started his own venture.

“It didn’t really capture me at the beginning,” Verchenko says of the stretch ceiling concept. Then he started researching, a process that began three years ago, and was hooked, he says.

His 20 Magnetic Dr. showroom and manufacturing facility, Universal Stretch Ceilings, opened in August 2010 around the Dufferin Street and Steeles Avenue area.

Stretch ceilings function as a decorative finish that attach to an aluminum track system. They can be custom-made in a variety of colours, prints, finishes and shapes like curves and domes.

The concept is pretty new in North America, he adds, having been available for only about five years. But even then the final custom product had to be ordered from Europe, which can be expensive to ship, he says.

Verchenko’s enterprise is distinct as he manufactures the final product on-site and can thereby control costs and pass on the savings to the consumer, he says. The actual material, which is distributed by only one company in the world located in Germany, he says, was apparently developed in Belgium in the 1940s. There’s a special recipe to developing the material, he says, and manufacturers in other parts of the world are trying to duplicate it, but aren’t getting it right.

[attach]3556[/attach]The ceilings have all sorts of applications. Currently, Verchenko is working with the developers of a shopping mall, and also with a limousine bus company that wants to install the custom features inside the vehicle.

“The opportunities of this technology are endless,”

There just aren’t a lot of ceiling options out there, he says, outside of a drywall ceiling finished in a popcorn finish or foam tiles.

“It’s easier to use what people know,” he says of the lack of innovation in the field.

It’s also more conservative in North America than in Europe, he adds. But so far people like the versatility of the ceilings, which can even be removed, transferred and reinstalled. And if people aren’t sure how they’re going to look once installed, Verchenko’s staff can create an electronic rendering of what the final product would look like based on the chosen colour, finish and shape.

Aside from being eco-friendly and non-toxic, Verchenko says the material doesn’t absorb odours and would be good for the food industry. It also doesn’t collect moisture so it would work for rooms with indoor pools or saunas.

A regular drywall ceiling will collect moisture in the paint, he explains, so the paint would have to be taken off and redone every few years.

Verchenko is introducing the concept to local designers, architects and builders.

Not surprisingly, Verchenko has the ceilings in his home. He says when his father first saw the ceilings in his kitchen, he asked when a second floor was put in.

The high gloss finish, Verchenko says, created an optical illusion.

“It enlarges the space … (and) it gives you the effect of no ceiling,” he says.

“It’s endless.”

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