Sawdust covers the floor, and the smell of cedar permeates the air inside the small warehouse in Geneva. Nanci Boehlke of Palos Park laughs and points to a tall, thin man wearing goggles bending over a board with a planer. “That’s my husband, Paul,” she says. “I still can’t believe it when I see him cutting wood. He was never this handy.”
Boehlke doesn’t appear to be doing anything remarkable. But carpentry was not one of the skills on his resume during his career as a mortgage banker, and it’s unlikely that outplacement consultants would suggest gazebo manufacturer as the logical career move after assistant vice president at Metmor Financial Services in Downers Grove.
Boehlke’s partners at Gazebo Junction in Geneva made career moves that were just as unlikely. Jim Gongaware of Batavia was a pilot for Delta Airlines, and Rob Falls of Geneva was a meter reader for Commonwealth Edison.
So what do you get when you combine an airline pilot, a mortgage banker and a meter reader? The very serious punch line is that you get a company that builds gazebos with the precision and dedication to detail of a pilot and the friendly and attentive customer service of a dedicated salesman. And the meter reader? His hobby, and real interest, is quality woodworking. It is with him that the story of Gazebo Junction begins.
In 1987, Falls was looking for a hobby. A farm boy originally from Sycamore, he loved to work with his hands and had begun tinkering with carpentry in his garage.
He added a deck to his house, and his neighbors started asking him to build decks for them. Word spread of his artistry, fast work and fair prices, and local lumberyards soon began referring customers to him.
Falls was busy building decks every weekend and evening. When one customer asked Falls to add a gazebo to his deck, Falls balked. “I hadn’t built a gazebo, and I wasn’t sure I could,” he recalled.
Pressed by the customer, Falls researched gazebo construction and investigated several gazebo kits on the market before agreeing to build it. He constructed the major components in his garage, then assembled them on the deck. The customer got his gazebo, and Falls was hooked.
In the meantime, Boehlke, Falls’ brother-in-law, was becoming disenchanted with the corporate environment. Boehlke loved selling and had made a living selling pianos at a shop in the Orland Square shopping center for three years. In 1983 he took a job as a loan officer, and in the next 11 years he worked as a mortgage banker. But when Metmor laid him off, Boehlke decided to strike out on his own.
“Every jumbo loan (over $300,000) I ever wrote, except for doctors, was for self-employed people,” Boehlke says. “It didn’t matter what the business, from sprinkler system sales to garbage collection, self-employment seemed to be the best way to make money.”
Boehlke had been admiring Falls’ capabilities and products for several years. He also thought a business that manufactured and sold gazebos was recession-proof. “People who buy gazebos are generally financially secure enough to be unaffected by slight downturns in the economy,” he says.
He convinced Falls that his sideline could be a profitable full-time business and also sold Falls on the idea that Boehlke was just the man to make the business big.
As Boehlke and Falls were ironing out details, Gongaware, who had attended Northern Illinois University in DeKalb with Boehlke, was considering his options.
Gongaware had wanted to fly since he was 7 years old, and had spent much of his life preparing for a career as a pilot. He had majored in mechanical engineering at Northern. Meticulous and naturally attentive to details, he was considered by friends to be the guy who could fix anything.
Shortly after graduation in December 1981, he joined the Air Force. During the next 10 years, Gongaware was assigned to bases from Texas to Alaska. His wife, Nancy, son Tony and daughter Kathleen, could never consider a place home.
As he rose in rank, Gongaware had more administrative duties and fewer opportunities to fly. Itchy to spend more time in the air, he left the Air Force in June 1991 and joined Delta Air Lines. He was excited by the prospect of stability and a permanent home. Airline pilots work unusual shifts and can be off-duty 15 days a month, so to fill his days and supplement the moderate income of a new pilot, Gongaware started assisting Falls with the deck and gazebo construction.
Gongaware’s dreams of stability and security soon dissolved into disappointment. Delta transferred Gongaware to four cities in fewer than nine months after downsizing its Chicago base in January 1994. Shortly after the fourth transfer, Delta furloughed Gongaware in October 1994.
The terms of the furlough left Gongaware in a touchy position. Before hiring new pilots, major airlines often require them to relinquish their rights to be recalled by former employers, so Gongaware was hesitant to seek another pilot position.
Gongaware decided to wait for a recall from Delta, which offered seniority and familiarity, and looked for a job that would let him use his other skills. When Falls approached Gongaware about working for him full time, Gongaware suggested a partnership. A year ago, Falls, Boehlke and Gongaware joined their talents in Gazebo Junction, with Falls as production manager, Boehlke as general manager and Gongaware as construction manager.
Starting a business is risky, but starting a gazebo-building business right before winter seemed downright insane. The partners were confident, though, and their families supported them. “Paul had never let me down before,” Nanci Boehlke says. “I trusted his decision.”
Her trust was not misplaced. One of the first things Boehlke did as general manager of the new Gazebo Junction was to persuade Edward Hines Lumber to carry Gazebo Junction kits. With 22 stores in the Chicago area, Hines would enable Gazebo Junction to reach a much greater market, Boehlke reasoned.
Dave Miech, commodities merchandiser at Hines, says Hines officials were not concerned that Gazebo Junction was only a few months old when Boehlke approached him. “We were impressed by the quality of the end product, workmanship and type of product,” Miech says. “We had carried gazebo kits before, but they were not as easy to put together. This is a much higher quality gazebo (than the ones we carried before).”
Cindy Kellogg is the manager of the Wauconda Hines store, one of about a dozen that display a constructed Gazebo Junction product. She says customer response has been good. “Even people who are stick building (building from scratch) admire the design,” Kellogg says. She has sold “about six or seven” gazebos, a large number for a luxury item, according to Kellogg.
“I’m really happy to be selling (the gazebos),” Kellogg says. “I like working with the gentlemen. They are very nice, and that’s hard to find.”
So what’s the big deal with gazebos? Developed in the 16th Century to provide a view outside garden walls, gazebos eventually became a private place away from the main house for solitude and contemplation.
Suburban gazebos may be an indirect result of post World War II public park development, according to Terry Harkness, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He theorizes that manufacturers who made pavilions for parks began to look for ways to sell more pavilions and targeted standard styles to the residential market.
“(Now) kits are affordable, and they appeal (to the homeowner) because they smack of the garden estate tradition,” Harkness says. “It’s almost as if there is a bit of architecture in the back yard.”
Homeowners yearning for a garden house can hire a carpenter or can build the gazebo themselves. The Family Handyman magazine, September 1995, estimates that do-it-yourselfers would need a week’s vacation plus several weekends to construct a gazebo. The cost savings could balance the time required; materials cost about $2,000 compared to a cost of $4,500 to $6,500 for a carpenter to build a 12-foot gazebo.
A Gazebo Junction kit costs from $2,995 to $8,400, depending on the size and style. Floors for gazebos not built on existing decks and options such as cupolas and installation are extra (installation for basic gazebos runs an additional $450 to $650). The kits take from two hours to seven hours to install, depending on the style.
Despite the extra expense, the partners of Gazebo Junction claim their products are worth it because they are better constructed than stick-built gazebos. “The pieces are fitted perfectly at the plant so there are no gaps,” Falls says.
The three unlikely partners also claim they have developed a better gazebo kit than others on the market. In November 1994, the Home Show at Pheasant Run in St. Charles gave them an unusual opportunity to refine their product. For four days, 12 hours each day, they sat and waited for customers, their eyes roaming over every inch of their gazebo display. They examined every nook, every screw, every hinge, every detail. They weren’t completely satisfied with what they saw.
“We said to each other, what would we want in our own gazebos?” Boehlke recalls. “After that show, we made a lot of minor adjustments.”
Each gazebo kit is made of western red cedar, which, Gongaware says, is not only beautiful but also naturally resistant to decay. The hinges are adjustable, so if exposure to the elements causes warping, a couple of turns of a screw will bring the doors back into perfect alignment. The screens are aluminum, easily removable for cleaning. The roof is finished inside.
Kathy Binder of Aurora says that attention to detail is what sold her on a Gazebo Junction gazebo. She had researched gazebos for five years before bringing an old, yellowed book about gazebos into their warehouse.
“I had always wanted one,” she says. “So for our 20th wedding anniversary (my husband, Joel, and I) gave the gazebo to each other, instead of a trip to Hawaii.” The look impressed her as much as the workers. “I am a perfectionist, but I don’t think I would have been as picky as they were when they installed it,” she says.
Despite a total cost of around $8,000, Binder says it was worth it; “I expect that we’ll make a lot of memories in there.”
Donna and Lewis Monti of Wheaton saw the kits at a local lumber yard but wanted an oblong gazebo. They called Gazebo Junction, which built and installed the kit to their specifications. The total cost was $13,000 for their custom-made gazebo, but Donna says, “I have not one regret. We’ve used it a lot.”
Donna Monti also offers a particularly enticing selling point for parents: “We find that when we’re out there the kids leave us alone.”
She was not only happy with the product, but also with the producers. “We’ve had a lot of work done on our house this summer,” Monti explains. “Gazebo Junction (had the only workmen who) did exactly what they said they were going to do, when they said they were going to do it.”
Boehlke declines to discuss specific sales figures, but says sales are good enough to require the expansion of their factory space next spring. They had two employees besides the partners in the summer, one this winter, who makes kits and assists in installations. In the meantime, to accommodate the slower winter months, they have designed Adirondack chair kits made of western red cedar, which retail for $150. They are available directly from Gazebo Junction, and Boehlke expects them soon to be available through home improvement stores.
Gongaware knew he had made the right career choice recently when his 7-year-old son, Tony, informed his mother that he wanted to be just like his dad when he grew up. “Oh, you want to be a pilot?” she asked.
“No,” Tony responded, surprised. “I want to build gazebos.”
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Gazebo Junction is at 0N960 Peck Rd., Geneva. Call 708-208-8182.
