GreenHeart Sees Expansion with Windows

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Marie Morocco just finished building a custom villa for herself in an upscale neighborhood. During her life she has overseen the construction of four houses, but had never worked with a company that had a designer on its team – until this year when she engaged GreenHeart Companies.

“GreenHeart was the easiest to deal with,” Morocco says. “We sold our house and we were under the gun to build a new one. They were here every single day to work with us because they knew they had to get it out.”

GreenHeart’s designer, Alexis Rossetti, worked with Morocco in designing her house and picking the materials, whether choosing stone for the fireplace, paint for the walls and light fixtures.

“It really helped to have somebody to bounce ideas off of,” says Morocco, who otherwise would have consulted with an interior designer.

GreenHeart, based in Boardman, is a construction company working to become more than just a construction company.

“There are design centers, homebuilders, and some people that do restoration. But we integrated all of that here as a one-stop shop,” says John Angelilli, chief financial officer of GreenHeart. “We take responsibility for all of it from start to finish.”

GreenHeart Companies, founded in 2009 as a home construction company, has split into five divisions: homes, commercial, windows, property management and design.

In 2018, GreenHeart will relaunch its windows division. The company will emphasize window-restoration work and open a design center in the front of its offices, 6001 Southern Blvd.

The design center will have displays of rooms for customers to inspect as well as samples of materials such as paint, tile and wood flooring, for residences and commercial business.

Dave Melanson works on a new set of windows he made to fit into the basement of a historic home in Toledo.

“The consumers themselves are very busy. We’re trying to ease that up so they are able to pick and choose all materials in-house and not have to leave,” says Ed Metzel, general manager of the design center. “The center will not only work with the restoration team, but on home remodels.”

GreenHeart is also integrating 3-D design software, 2020Design, and that will help customers use the computer to design any room in their houses. “It’s hard to visualize sometimes when you can’t do this,” says Angelilli.

Angelilli’s father, Pat, began building houses in the 1970s after emigrating from Italy. “He would build one home a year and sell it and start building another home,” Angelilli says.

His father continued to do this through the early 1990s when his son, Brian, took over as president and expanded into commercial construction.

Construction jobs were plentiful until 2009, after the housing market crashed.

So Brian changed the focus of the company from houses and commercial jobs to smaller jobs that customers were more likely to need and could afford – such as restoring and replacing windows.

John was consulting for the family business and joined full-time two years ago.

“I liked consulting but you could never really dig in. And this was an opportunity to have a partnership with Brian in one of the divisions,” he says, “which was restoration.”

The window restoration division has seen more activity as urban renewal becomes more popular with young people returning to inner cities and older suburbs.

The quality of the windows in older and historic houses is a much better than what is manufactured today because craftsmen in the 1920s ’30s and ’40s made most of the windows specific to their neighborhoods, Angelilli says.

Many times the windows in an older building must be kept to maintain its architectural integrity or the neighborhood. The cost of manufacturing a window to the original quality would be more expensive than restoring it.

GreenHeart serves customers in the Mahoning Valley as well as the Cleveland and Toledo areas. All three cities, Angelilli notes, are undergoing renewal.

His company has replaced and restored windows at the Erie Terminal Place apartments and in the Stambaugh Building, soon to open as a DoubleTree hotel, and Wick Tower.

“There’s not many companies restoring windows,” Angelilli says. “It’s very time-consuming and hands-on because every window is different.”

Pictured: John Angelilli joined the family-business two years ago.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.