Enter Jun Alejo, a Filipino businessman based in California who owns Floor Station Inc., the largest floor-covering distributor on the West Coast with companies such as Anderson Hardwood Floors, Pacific Rim Bamboo and Wilsonart. Jun’s company was hired to restore the floor – not an easy task since they had to extract all the planks and replicate the designs on new white oak – and the project is expected to finish in August.
His company has also worked on the houses of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, among other celebrities. While Jun dealt only with Spielberg’s designer, he personally met with Hanks’ wife Rita Wilson, whom he describes as very down-to-earth. The same with Streisand. "They’re very humble. Barbra taught me to drink tea because I’m such a heavy coffee drinker. She’s a very nice lady." (Unfortunately, clauses in their contracts with his company don’t allow him to show us pictures of their homes.)
If you’re a fan of the TV show Charmed, you’ve probably noticed the Halliwell sisters’ manor, a nice two-story red house that the witches (Piper especially, with her power to blow things up) keep wrecking, particularly the attic where the Book of Spells is curiously left unguarded on a stand. Jun’s company did the manor’s floor. No, the vortex that opens in the basement floor was probably a CGI thingie.
Floor Station also did the Lakers home arena Staples Center in LA, the JC Penney and Crabtree & Evelyn stores across the US, the chain Regis Salon which has more than 800 branches, and the MSNBC studios in New York.
Jun was in Manila in January, having just opened Floor Station in the Philippines last year. He’s now at work with modernist architect Ed Calma to develop engineered floor made from coconut husks. "Ed owns hectares of coconut trees and since I’m a manufacturer, he wants me to create floor using the husk. We’re going to do some prototypes and hopefully will be able to show the finished product at the Surfaces trade show next year. When my company did Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, we used all Mactan stone from Cebu. These are things that come from our country and if we can do the coconut-husk floor, yayaman ang Pilipinas."
So why is a successful Filipino coming back to establish a company here? For one, the 40-year-old Jun plans to go international – his goal is to set up distribution centers in Southeast Asia starting with Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand – with the Philippines as his company’s base. When he did the numbers, he realized that the potential sales form these four countries combined would equal only what the company makes in California alone. "The secret to success here is niche marketing; in the US, people can pretty much afford everything, but not here."
Floor Station started in the US in 1985 on a capital of only $3,000 with the Alejo couple as the only employees (the company is now worth $15 million). Today, it has about 93 employees and the company distributes different floor surfaces including wood, laminate, bamboo, ceramic tiles and carpets. It also owns a factory in Pecate, Mexico, where the Philippine flag flies high.
For the Philippine market, they’re bringing in three brands: Anderson, which makes hardwood floors like hickory, oak and maple; Wilsonart, which makes hard-density laminated floor; and Pacific Rim Bamboo, which uses bamboo from China.
According to Jun, Wilsonart is the biggest producer of laminate and, of the 86 manufacturers around the world, is the only one creating premium laminate flooring, which means thicker layers. "Because it’s thicker, you can install it in high-traffic areas like malls or retail stores. If you install it in your house, we give you 25 years of warranty against wear, fade and water damage. In other words, if something happens to that floor, we will replace it without charge."
Even if it’s the consumer’s fault like a dog pees on it? "The floor won’t be damaged," he assures us. "Other brands are thinner, so when you drop something or when you walk on it, 95 percent of the impact is absorbed by the laminate surface (the layer on top of the HDF), not the thickness of the cork. Laminate reacts to temperature, cork reacts to humidity and if you have a thin piece of laminate on top, it will definitely move and get damaged quicker."
For Tom Hanks’ basement, which has a hockey rink and a pool table for his kids, they used Wilsonart laminate floor. The same with high-traffic retail stores, including a Honda showroom.
"It’s warm, it’s designed for young couples who have kids under 10 and it’s zero maintenance," Jun adds.
For something a little less common, there’s Pacific Rim Bamboo, which takes Asia’s most common grass species (yes, bamboo is a type of grass, not wood, and China alone has 1.6 million square miles of it under cultivation) and makes floor planks out of it.
Did you know that bamboo is harder than oak? Or that a typical bamboo has a tensile strength of 28,000 per square inch compared to steel’s 23,000? Or that of the three kinds of floor that Floor Station distributes it is the least expensive one, following Anderson and Wilsonart?
Bamboo comes in vertical and horizontal designs, and the bamboo dust that comes off in the processing is recycled and molded into bamboo planks. "We’re the only one that does that," Jun says. "We’re an environment-friendly company, it’s all about protecting the planet."
Pacific Rim Bamboo had been in business for 16 years when Jun bought the company four years ago and added a new design to its existing catalogue: hand-scraped floor. He looked at the pockmarked planks of solid hickory wood and asked himself, well, why not for bamboo?
The bamboo floor comes in two colors – natural and carbonized. The latter means the floor is burned – like sugarcane, heat darkens it – instead of stained. "We don’t use polyurethane. We use aluminum oxide, and there are only five manufacturers that use this high-end finish. It’s a liquid sandpaper that we apply, so even if your dog scratches it, your dog’s nails will get filed but your floor won’t scratch."
Anderson Hardwood Floors engineers wooden planks made of species like Siberian and Manchurian oak, maple, Brazilian cherry, African ebony, red oak, white oak, pecan, hickory, walnut, and Malaysian merbau. Not to worry, this company takes its environmental responsibility seriously. It has planted nearly a million trees in 18 US states and four countries under the auspices of the Hardwood Forestry Fund.
Jun says that the prevailing taste in Hollywood now is to use one type of floor for the entire house, which is solid wood for the moneyed class. "In the past, when you walk into the living and dining rooms you’d have wood floors, in the kitchen it’s ceramic tiles, same thing in the powder room or bathroom, then in the hallway it’s wood, and the bedrooms have carpet. Now, it’s one kind of floor and it’s wood. That’s what the moneyed choose."
Jun Alejo is one of those who left the Philippines to look for a job and ended up living the American dream 20 years later.
"America is the land of no mercy," he says of his career, which began in sales at a tile company (which he later competed against when he opened his own store). His father, former DPWH Minister Ramon Alejo Sr., always advised him: "If you have a goal, you have to set a time table for you to accomplish it and if you don’t, you move on to another one."
He’s proof that the US is also a land that rewards hard work. At the start, he tirelessly attended classes and training in business and management – and most of the time he was the only Asian, surrounded by Caucasians – and he learned the ropes of the floor-covering industry in a remarkably short time.
For 11 years, Jun would pass this one house in California perched on a mountain. And every time, he would tell himself, "One day, I will buy that house."
Last year, the house went on the market. Today, Jun calls it his home.