john_leed_architect's Profile

Hi Igorman,

We purchase VIFAH Snapping Deck Tiles for a multiple projects, and some of them are very high end hotels and resorts. I have to re-iterate that these are very high-end, luxury projects. There is no question about VIFAH Snapping Deck Tiles, especially if you install it correctly and select the right material for different climate, as different wood reacts differently. We use VIFAH Ipe Tiles in some areas, VIFAH Acacia Tiles in other areas, etc.

VIFAH price is very low, because we are working directly with the factory (through no middleman therefore no middle additional cost). While we were at their factory, we saw that VIFAH has an extremely sufficient production process for the tiles and large inventory of raw materials. I'm convinced that these two reasons significantly reduce the costs.

There may be better products out there; but our firm is very happy with VIFAH products and their factory meets all of our requirements such as safe labor, eco-friendly materials (FSC certified), factory-direct, etc.

Cheers,
John

Hi Igorman.

I would suggest you to contact VIFAH Snapping Deck Tile directly to speak with them about the issues you have. We have no problem with them so far. I would suggest you to look at how you install the products and prepare the surface. Getting recommendation from VIFAH directly seems to be the best way.

In fact, we just finalized our 2008 program with VIFAH, and And we will buy more than 2,000,000 (2 million) square feet alone in 2008 for our projects.

In addition to FSC-certified Eucalyptus, plantation-grown Acacia, and certified Shorea, we are also buying Ipe Snapping Deck Tiles from VIFAH. From our experience so far, Ipe is quite overrated in terms of pricing and quality. We find that Acacia tiles are the least expensive one but outperforms all other wood including Ipe. There are a lot of advantages of using Acacia for decking due to its natural characteristics and huge amount of raw materials, while we have a lot of problems with illegal Ipe source before from South America.

I strongly you to look into acacia and eucalyptus as options for larger projects, before they perform very stable for us.

Good luck with your projects.

John

I find the above article quite interesting. As an architecture firm in New York City, we have reviewed all the lines of deck tiles including the EzyDeck, SwiftDeck, VIFAH Snapping Deck Tiles, KwikDek, and some others that I can't remember their name at this point; but we finally decide to go with VIFAH Snapping Deck Tiles for multiple projects over the last few years in the city. For many reasons:

1. VIFAH is the only company who can provide us a complete set of documents not only on legal wood sources but also supporting eco-friendly harvesting of forests. This is very important for us, because we have fairly large projects with the size of 20,000 sqft or more; and eco-friendly material is very important to us. VIFAH provides us complete documents on their FSC certification, and their FSC-certified wood sources. Many others claim to us it's eco-friendly material, but they don't have the supporting documents.

2. VIFAH is the only one out there who is truly factory-direct. We personally visit the factory and look at the production as well as their mills. Because our projects are fairly large, we prefer to buy directly from the factory to cut off the middle costs; and it's also much easier to work directly with the factory because they are the most knowledgable people on the product.

3. Brand name. When we looked at this product, VIFAH Snapping Deck Tiles has already established itself as a brand at multiple stores out there including some of the largest building distributors and hardware stores. This gives us the confidence in the product and in our projects.

4. Pricing. VIFAH offers us the great deals - tiles ranging from $1.50 to $4.00 per sqft for various materials (e.g. Ipe, Eucalyptus, Shorea, Teak, Acacia, etc) for various patterns. You can't find this price anywhere else. The only reason that we can have this price with VIFAH, because they are factory direct and cut off all the middle costs.

If you are in the city, and would like to see a couple of projects that we did, please feel free to contact me. We have projects that were installed a couple of years ago, and it still looks perfectly good.

John