Ciot in Troy Readies State-of-the-Art Warehouse/Showroom for Nature’s Masterpieces – and Much More

17

OCTOBER 2018

BY HONEY MURRAY

LBN Community Series
Troy

Jeff Glasener, Vice President of Detroit Ciot in Troy, grins, rubs his eyes, and quickly straightens his sport coat — a tweed that blends some of the same colors as the majestic slabs of stone that surround him.

“We closed a very important deal early this morning, and I just received the contract. Luckily,” he chuckles, “our lawyer will help with those 50 pages!”

Ciot, the stone, tile, and specialty design company begun in Montreal 68 years ago, is celebrating the tenth anniversary of Troy’s Detroit Ciot, its first showroom in the United States, and they’ve been so successful here that they are constructing – and have almost completed – a 55,000 square-foot warehouse and showroom, dedicated only to slabs (man-made, or of stone, glass, composites).

JEFF GLASENER

VICE PRESIDENT OF DETROIT CIOT IN TROY

“Though we offer an endless variety of tile for builders and homeowners,” says Glasener, “our focus area is primarily stone and slabs. Our current, 10,000 square-foot slab gallery is beautiful and holds 1000 slabs. We also have inventory in four other buildings. Our new warehouse will house 10,000 slabs.”

“In states like Florida or California,” Glasener explains, “slabs can typically remain outdoors. Some suppliers store them in Quonset huts or other dingy structures. But in Michigan’s freeze-thaw environment, the material needs to be protected. And our new warehouse-and-showroom is definitely state-of-the-art!”

The outside walls will be clad in slabs and glass.

“It’s designed with a whole new standard of displaying and showcasing the slabs,” says Glasener.

These exotic natural and manufactured slabs are used by over 200 local fabricators to offer designers, builders, and homeowners the precise material to personalize and beautify anything from a countertop, wall, furnishing, floor, or door frame to a corporate lobby, exterior structure, or even to create a work of art.

“We love our fabricators.” Glasener says. “The projects they complete with our products and designs are amazing!”

Glasener also loves the business of stone, which he has been in since he was sixteen.

“My dad, who owned a Chicago ad agency and had several factory owners as clients, always got me summer jobs at those factories when I was a teenager,” he explains. “One day, after I’d been crawling around inside a boiler, cleaning it out, my dad had me run an errand for him to a tile and stone company.”

“We’re not a typical tile or slab company,” says Spielmann. “Ciot is a fashion-forward, trendsetting powerhouse. We sell exquisite hard surfaces instead of fabric and cloth.”

“When that owner saw me in the state I was in,” he continues, “he said, ‘Hey! How would you like a different job? You can start here tomorrow!’ So, I did. After two weeks I was on the floor selling stone and, eventually, was president of a national stone company for 25 years. Now I am here, and it is great to be working at Ciot during such growth.”

Company-wide, Ciot imports over 2500 containers of stone and slab per year – and each container’s area is 5000 square feet.

The stone is gathered from more than 30 countries. Several times a year, owner and architect Benny Spielmann travels to Spain, Brazil, Israel, Italy, India or Africa and works with his team of stone buyers, who help make mining and purchase decisions.

“Our buyers not only need to be geologists, but they have to understand design and trends. They also help maintain our great relationships with quarries around the world,” Spielmann says. “We hand-select the quartz, granite, marble – and even semiprecious pieces of tiger eye, jasper, amethyst – and often buy it in the shape of large blocks. It’s like jewelry in large scale!”

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The blocks are sent to specialty processing facilities to be cut and polished into slabs.

“We’re not a typical tile or slab company,” says Spielmann. “Ciot is a fashion-forward, trendsetting powerhouse. We sell exquisite hard surfaces instead of fabric and cloth.”

And now those exquisite, hard surfaces – many of them brilliantly jewel-like – will soon have a new, light-filled, multi-million-dollar, elegant space of their own, at Detroit Ciot in Troy.