Route 12 North: Everything Including The Kitchen Sink
Kitchen Associates, 76 Leominster Rd., Sterling
But it's really more than that. The large, squat building houses not just brightly lit displays of wooden cabinets and granite countertops, but also a manufacturing area where workers craft sinks for hospitals and tables for New York City apartment buildings. Having built the business from scratch over several decades, Sponenberg can be forgiven if he is not shaken by reports of economic downturn.
"For us it hasn't been a marked decline," he said.
Custom Everything
Sponenberg got his start in furniture 50 years ago, making cabinets in his third-floor apartment and selling them from the trunk of his car.
Asked why he got into the business, he smiles and answers, "My kids kept crying they wanted to eat."
Today two of those kids, along with a grandson, are among the approximately 50 employees who take on a broad range of work at the company.
In Kitchen Associates' Sterling Surfaces division, designers and production workers use DuPont's synthetic Corian material to make everything from an airport car rental counter to a kitchen sink. In the late 1990s, Sterling also made unusual Corian chairs and loveseats for the dining concourse in New York's Grand Central Station.
Most of the furniture on display at Kitchen Associates comes from a Pennsylvania company, but Sponenberg said the company can make custom accessories to complement the kitchen sets. That, along with the large inventory that the store keeps in stock, allows it to compete with other kitchen stores, which are largely mom and pop operations. Sponenberg said the company tries to avoid going too far toward either a luxury or discount market.
"We don't want to be the down and dirty stuff," he said. "On the other hand, we don't want to spend a year doing a kitchen for someone."
Kitchen Associates mostly sells American-made products. Sponenberg said it may eventually make sense to sell imports, but so far the cabinets from China that he's seen at other stores haven't impressed him. "We tear out better kitchens than those," he said.
Sponenberg said providing decent quality has to be part of his company's strategy, in part because much of its business comes from referrals. Also, as families move from one house to another, it's not unsual to get repeat business. Recently, Sponenberg said, the company finished its third kitchen for one woman.
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