Garage doors have come a long way. For decades they simply stood sentinel to welcome vehicles and hide our belongings. Today, 71% of families use the garage as the primary entrance to the home, and the role of the door has changed. Now we see design innovation and manufacturing excellence furnishing garages with absolute beauty and supreme function. At Fimbel ADS we are committed to carrying forth the quality and craftsmanship our great-grandfather built our family business upon while blending in the marvels of today's manufacturing capabilities.

Whether you are building (or rebuilding) your dream home, we want to help enhance your curb appeal, ensure sustainability and energy efficiency, and allow for a low-maintenance lifestyle. With a Fimbel door you can count on more, and we have the patents to back it up.

A patent for an invention is issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and gives rights to the inventor generally for a duration of 20 years. While many product patents never grace the shelves in stores, owning patents demonstrates a great many things. It speaks to the power of innovation and creativity, to one's determination to solve a particular problem, and the hope that what we make will make a difference. Patents also allow us to not only understand the original vision and usage for a product but also understand the innovation behind the idea itself!

The Fimbel Family has been an interwoven fiber of the garage door story since its origin in the 1920's. Today our innovations hold four patents showcasing our desire to bring our customers more. Applying these innovations to our operations based on quality and safety, we know we can offer solutions that last!

Essentially, we make two products – two platforms upon which you can design away! 

1. The American Legends Series

Our first construction platform offers carriage and traditional styles using a vinyl clad steel pan and applying vinyl overlays to create the look of a classic wood door. This door is exceptional for two main reasons - the first is the platform (pan) made of a smooth, steel base created for the elements that we coat (clad) in a thin layer of crisp, white vinyl. This innovation allows for the American Legends series to live nearly anywhere, even near the ocean, without rusting and rotting away in the elements. The second is the addition of our smooth, solid overlays made of sustainable material. Separating ourselves from the competition's fake wood grain completes the constructed look to appear as real, painted, traditional wood. Both features ensure the longevity our ethics demand of us, the look we all crave, and a price point sure to please.

2. The Estate Collection: Euro, Presidential, and Roaring Twenties

Our second construction platform, the Estate Collection, truly welcomes the designer in all of us to emerge with the blend between tradition and innovation. Using a hand placed wood frame and nesting in our insulation, we laminate a vinyl back cover and a solid vinyl exterior that encases the face. This slab now becomes a blank slate to bring you more for your door. 

Using both ⅜" and ¾" material, Versatex for unfinished doors and Tricoya for finished doors, we have options to add select profiles and nearly limitless designs to satisfy inspiration. These capabilities allow us to build the door in 1" height and width increments. You will see these designs in our Euro-Dor and Presidential Series offering carriage, traditional, and modern styles. 

To achieve a more classic carriage look, we offer the Roaring Twenties. This series starts with the same platform yet adds solid, study overlays pocketed (nested) into the face. The pronounced look of this classic style can be modified in myriad ways to satisfy decorative features and historical applications. Each of these series offers incredible longevity and beauty we can all feel good about. 

Standard and Custom Tops Available

We don't hold back with the designs on our doors, so we can't hold back on the designs of our glass sections. Much like the sections described above, we use a solid sheet to create the face and contain the design. The one-piece grille with no joints or inserts and various profile options adds instant design appeal. In most of our doors we offer both large or small window options with custom designs, including window shape and placement, and custom arches available for your design needs. 

Finishing Options

As you dream of your door coming to life, don't forget to consider your options. We are very proud of our factory finish and offer it in both standard and custom paint options but also in an array of hand-applied faux stain. The result is the finest finish in the industry and brings a furniture-like finish to exterior architecture. With a strong warranty and compassion for the earth, our paint is an excellent addition to your garage door.

Using heat-reflective high-performance paint, all Factory Finished products will be delivered with a clean finish to last! While most of our products do not require finishing and may remain natural white, adding color to your project can add the wow-factor that you are after! Our vast and ever-expanding color palette includes blacks, charcoals and dark greens as well as faux stains to truly replicate the look of wood without the maintenance. With solutions for replacement of damaged sections to navigating tough exposures to Do-It-Yourself options, our finish will brighten up your home and increase durability. To read more about it, enjoy this blog. 

More Options

Make it your own by choosing specialty glass for your garage door. With these options and many more, you can add style and details to your project while managing your privacy and the natural light you let in!

For a true carriage look, we offer a variety of options for decorative hardware. From strap hinges and pull handles to latches and clavos, you can further customize your door! Many standard kits are available, but the options are limitless!

Fimbel Wind Load approved garage doors offer your home protection during extreme wind conditions. Through rigorous testing over the years to determine wind load eligibility, we continue to optimize our product to bring you the highest quality and safety you can count on.

With additional options for the interior of the garage door, you can customize to complement your garage lifestyle. Offering interior backer options for all our doors gives an upgrade to the aesthetics. Our interior grille inserts provide the look of true divided lites and classes up the glass. We don't stop there - powder coated track, robust spring packages, and custom details allow you to make it your own.

More for YOU!

Whether you are building (or rebuilding) your dream home, we want to help enhance your curb appeal, ensure sustainability and energy efficiency, and allow for a low-maintenance lifestyle. We build our legacy and our innovation into every door we make.

For nearly a century we have chosen our partners wisely. Today, more than ever, we know that choosing partners with shared values of quality, innovation, and sustainability is crucial. With confidence we put our name and our legacy behind every single door we craft, but we cannot do this alone. While our team of dedicated employees constructs the doors, our material suppliers play a necessary role in our consistency and reliability.

One partner who has demonstrated time and again their commitment to the product they make and the industry we serve is VERSATEX Building Products. Since 2004, they have become a leading supplier of diverse PVC products to the building industry. We began using their material in sheet form as our preferred primary material in 2015 because of their incomparable commitment to quality, innovation, and sustainability.

VERSATEX is a free-foamed cellular PVC material that replicates the beauty of wood yet provides long lasting protection against rot, cracking, and decay— all without requiring any paints or sealants to protect it from the environment. Unlike wood, VERSATEX is impervious to moisture, insect-resistant and will not rot, rust, or corrode. VERSATEX requires less maintenance than wood, wood composites, or fiber cement trims. It is an ideal solution for moisture sensitive areas, including those along coastal zones or regions affected by salt and high humidity.

These attributes of beauty and durability have given us the confidence and the capability to manufacture made-to-order, gorgeous, high quality doors with a product and a warranty that stand strong regardless of proximity to the ocean, rivers, harsh geological environments, and life's everyday messes. 

What do they make?

In its origin, VERSATEX made trimboard to add decorative elements to exterior applications where wood was once used. This offered the customer a lifestyle with less maintenance. This original product then expanded to offer the PVC in sheet form. In this form, we are able to apply the sheet to our fully insulated wood core to surround and protect the frame. Thanks to the nature of the material, we can machine and manipulate it to create nearly endless design options while offering the same, low-maintenance lifestyle on the garage door.

One rather new and stunning product of theirs is the Canvas Series. The tongue and groove PVC trim will complement your next project from porch ceilings to soffits and feature walls, the options are vast! Similar to the rest of the product line, this option removes the repeated demand of restaining hardwood. 

But they don't stop there! They also offer a variety of products, each developed with the end user in mind, that enhance the elegance of various project such as:

• Corners
• Column Wraps
• Soffit, Fascia, & Frieze
• Mouldings
• Beadboard & Shiplap
• And so much more!

Who are they?

First and foremost, the organization is built upon a strong value proposition for quality and innovation which is in line with ours. They also share our commitment to sustainability which they detail on their website. In addition, the team at VERSATEX is simply made of good people that quite frankly, we enjoy being around. In this way, like begets like, and they connect quality with quality. This network creates opportunities for relationships with other builders, OEMs, contractors, and so many others to build outside of this partnership.

VERSATEX is known for its commitment to the building industry to educate and inform. They continue to build models into their system to empower their customers to make the most of their product for the best possible results. Brand Ambassadors are trained and empowered to educate and inform. The Roadshow with Bobby Parks travels the country doing onsite presentations and offering educational opportunities on best practices and tactics for VERSATEX and beyond! (Side note: Bobby Parks is the MAN. He is pictured with me below after a hot August day doing demos in a parking lot with smiles on our faces!)

They have built an insanely strong presence in social media by connecting quality professionals with resources, support networks, and opportunities. Through podcasts, blogs, videos, and so much more, they have created a community of talent and experience from which we can all learn and grow. They even interviewed us twice: once in traditional podcast form and once on video. To join the community, click here to read a note from the team and sign up!

In short, they are the kind of people - the kind of organization - you want to be around, you want to work with, and you want to learn and grow from.

Pairing Fimbel ADS with VERSATEX, "you're only limited by your imagination".

To learn more about them, find them online and on social!

#TheVersatexWay

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There is artistry and inspiration found in the unique style of glass honed in the 20th century that brought light in, around, and under. While it was born through function, today we enjoy it for the fashion. Originally crafted to solve the struggle of limited light in the underbelly of ocean crossing ships, prism glass absorbs the outdoor light, pulls it in, and disperses it through the interior of the designated space. The fact that the end result was stunning even then is a total bonus.

When this type of glass is used today, it is a representation of an era that valued quality, ingenuity, and sustainability. Today we use this glass on many of our Landmarks doors produced for the FDNY with the same values in mind: quality, ingenuity, and sustainability. Let's take a closer look at prism glass.

Prism glass is an architectural glass which bends and redirects daylight through refraction and reflection. If you aren't thinking of Pink Floyd's album, the Dark Side of the Moon, we will have to talk later; however, many of us are familiar with the single beam of white light hitting the triangular prism and splitting the beam into its individual parts thus creating the rainbow. This iconic representation may be the most widely known (at least by music and cultural standards) depiction of how light refraction works. 

This innovation in glass became common around the turn of the 20th century. The first patent for prism glass described it in this way: "Whereby the reflection of the light into the room is considerably increased without increasing the size of the window." It elaborated to state the innovation would "double the quantity of reflection or illumination."

At this time (1882), Edison had formed the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York which was, (albeit slowly) bringing electricity to much of Manhattan. During the transition, many people still relied on gas light and candles to illuminate their homes. It was some 50 years before half of New Yorkers were able to incorporate electric power into their homes. It's no wonder this innovation was applied to rooms and spaces beneath sidewalks and entryways as New Yorkers awaited their Edison electricity!

The same was true of structures of the time such as firehouses. In many cases, prism glass was used to shine light from the front of the building into the living space and the basement of the structure. Many firehouses were known to have removable floors inside the door that would illuminate the basement.

FDNY

A walk through the streets of New York's five boroughs will undoubtedly bring you past one of the 197 Engine Houses associated with the FDNY. Most of the doors you will see have been manufactured by Fimbel either then or now. Together with our team at Thompson Overhead Door in Brooklyn, the FDNY, and the Landmark Society of New York, we bring the facades of historic firehouses back to life with stunning commercial garage doors that look like art. Utilizing block prism glass is one way that we incorporate art, function, and history into our vinyl and composite constructed doors. Our low maintenance products have the look of painted wood and are built to last.

If you would like to learn more about our products, please enjoy this blog and the many others we have available, or find a dealer to start the conversation at www.fimbelads.com/dealers.