‘Amazing’ Exterior Beads Elevate Florida Custom Home

The project: high-quality stucco for a high-end South Florida spec home 

If you’re building a spec home in the million-dollar-plus price range, contractors have very little room for error. From its foundation to its final finishes, luxury buyers expect luxury-level quality — and since a spec house is built with no buyer lined up yet, these kinds of properties need to look especially impressive. And this was the kind of job Griffin Stucco took on in Wellington, Fla., where they needed to ensure their stucco work — and the exterior beads they used to finish it — was, from top to bottom, of the highest quality possible.

Located in a highly sought-after location (in a gated community attached to a prestigious polo, golf and country club just outside South Florida’s famous Palm Beach) the spec house was custom-built from the ground up to appeal to modern, high-end buyers. As such, its stucco finish needed to be perfectly clean, perfectly level and, just as importantly, to stay looking perfect for many years to come — no small task in the harsh, coastal conditions of the area. 

For this, Griffin Stucco turned to Trim-Tex Exterior Solutions for high-quality beads and accessories that could help them provide a good-looking stucco finish that stands the test of time.

The products: ‘The quality is amazing’

For this project, the team at Griffin Stucco chose multiple Trim-Tex Exterior beads to help them finish the job, including two sizes of Corner Bead — the classic 2 ½” x 2 ½” Corner Bead and the extra-large 4” x 4” version — Standard Flange Casing Beads against many windows and a handful of others, like the Channel Casing Bead for clean band details.

“Trim-Tex products help me a lot with the production part of the house,” says Gary Schlechta, a supervisor for Griffin Stucco. “It's about making all the corners nice and straight, level, making sure that my finishes will come out perfect. When I think about the products that I'm going to use, I try to make sure that it's going to be quick, easy for my guys and my finishes are going to come out perfect and nice and level … Trim-Tex products, the quality is amazing. I highly recommend it.”

Of course, one major reason Gary and the Griffin Stucco team chose Trim-Tex Exterior beads is for their PVC materials. These grant numerous benefits to the crews that use them, no matter where you are — durability, flexibility and easy installations, for instance — but it’s especially crucial to use these kinds of materials in harsh coastal environments like the ones found in South Florida. Humid, salty air can fatally damage metal-backed finishes; PVC, meanwhile, is impervious to these sorts of threats. 

“PVC lasts a lot longer than metal,” Schlechta tells us. “Metal — it corrodes, it rusts. Plastic, you don't have that problem. Stucco also adheres to it a lot better, using plastic versus metal.”

The payoff: ‘It’s going to last a lot longer’

As with any contractor, Griffin Stucco has certain priorities when choosing their building materials: cost, time, labor, ease-of-use and so on. But for the Schlechta and the team at Griffin, they make their name on one thing above all — quality. For stucco finishers like these, they need building materials that are going to help them achieve the flawless, level, long-lasting finish that they’re known for. And if they can do that on time or ahead of schedule, well, even better.

“[Trim-Tex] helped it out tremendously because sometimes these guys get paid by the piece — the quicker they can get a house done, the better it is,” says Schlechta. “But, at the same time, it's all about making sure that the quality is top-notch … I think it's going to last a lot longer — it’s a lot stronger. 

"It's a little bit easier on my guys, it makes it a little bit faster. But at the end of the day, it's the quality that I care about, and Trim-Tex makes my quality come out amazing."

Thank you to the Griffin Stucco crew for being so generous with their time as we checked out their excellent work here in Wellington. You can learn more about their services and hire them for your next project here.

And to learn more about Trim-Tex Exterior Solutions, seeing is believing — you can request a free sample kit that contains 10 of our most popular exterior beads, including a corner bead and casing bead used on this project. Hit the button below to get started!