Craig Yosin is in the business of great first impressions.
Yosin owns Hardwood Door and Bevel in Auburn Hills, where he sells a wide variety of hardwood and iron doors, beveled glass windows, and decorative door hardware.
Customers come here, he says, for the beauty of hardwood and iron, and “they want to enjoy their house to the fullest extent.” A striking entryway can increase the value of a home, he notes.
Half of his customers, he says, are remodeling their homes, while others are building new ones.
Yosin’s business journey began in 1972, when he was only 19 and living in Fraser. “On the way home (from night school) I was on my motorcycle and was hit by a car,” Yosin says. In excruciating pain, he experienced a “miracle” healing that included a vision that he should work with stained glass. “It was a consuming desire,” he says.
Yosin taught himself the craft, and began selling his custom-made stained glass products. He even created church windows and taught classes throughout the 1970s.
By the early 1980s, he concluded he could skip over the middle man and sell the doors that would hold his stained glass.
Around 1984, he decided to begin selling doors through his company, Hardwood Door and Bevel.
By 1987 he’d found a hardwood door distributor in Guatemala. Yosin and his employees did the finish work — Thermopaning windows, staining the wood, and adding hardware, he says.
The wood he can provide for his clients’ doors includes mahogany, cherry, oak, walnut, and alder — all of which are displayed in his showroom on Opdyke Road. He works with a number of hardware companies, including Rocky Mountain.
His customers, he says, are looking for “more uniqueness, and a flavor and flow that accent their house.”
Crews at his current 30,000-square-foot facility, acquired in 2003, also create sidelights, the long rectangular windows that bookend doors. They can build transoms and fashion wine cellar doors, too.
On a recent day in the shop, one elegant leaded-glass sidelight handmade by Yosin’s craftsmen lay on a table awaiting a final review. Customers are invited to see their product design in advance. “With custom windows, they’re getting exactly what they want,” Yosin says. Can’t decide? Yosin has catalogs filled with available designs. Costs for any of the installed door systems can range between $4,000 and $12,000, and Yosin says he ships doors all over the United States.
About five years ago, all-iron doors began entering the market and Yosin added them to his product line. He found a factory to make the elegant doors, which are really works of art themselves. The doors are shipped to and assembled at Yosin’s warehouse.
Welcoming and upbeat, Yosin, who lives in Shelby Township, is ready to show customers the hundreds of door options he can provide, be it in carved wood or ornate iron.
His company’s front door is a stunning, colorful stained-glass work of art that he designed and helped create. At his shop, he says, “we do things other people just don’t do.”
More information: 2333 Commercial Dr., Auburn Hills, 248-377-9460, irondoorsbyhdb.com
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