When Colin Kaepernick sits in front of his locker before games at the new San Francisco 49ers Levi’s Stadium, he’ll be surrounded by the finely crafted beauty of woodwork created at a millwork shop in Carson City.
He won’t be alone.
From the fans who throng retail shops, bars and concession stands at the 67,000-seat stadium to the owners who watch games from their luxurious and private perch, everyone who enters the facility will be touched by the craftsmanship of the 85 workers of Complete Millwork Services Inc.
The office of Jeff Stone, senior vice president of Complete Millwork, is stacked high with working drawings for hundreds of features at the newly opened stadium.
Metal sculptures that incorporate more than 5,000 regulation-sized NFL footballs. Cabinetry in team offices. One-of-a-kind facades for concessions areas. Luxurious woodwork and leather in players’ locker rooms and owners suites.
For more than two years, employees of Complete Millwork have been designing and building one-of-a-kind items for the stadium.
In fact, they’re still completing some last-minute touches — a glass concierge desk, for instance — even though the $1.2 billion stadium has hosted its first preseason football game.
Raw and recycled lumber was cut, shaped, sanded, assembled and finished to a high gloss for the stadium project. Other materials — metals, leather, glass — were incorporated to bring the stadium architects’ vision to reality.
The work was exacting and required careful instruction of an installation crew that, at its peak, totaled 90 workers.
“Everything was built to tolerances of a quarter inch or an eighth of an inch,” says Stone, noting it all needed to fit with electrical, plumbing and other fixtures in the 1.85-million-square-foot stadium.
“But you know much we had to re-do? Nothing.”
Even the logistics involved with shipping hundreds of items from Carson City to the stadium — making sure all the parts, all the bolts were on board — required detailed attention.
Complete Millwork was invited to bid as a subcontractor to Turner/Devcon, the joint venture of big construction companies that built Levi’s Stadium.
David Becher, president of Complete Millwork and its co-owner with Lester Robertson, said the Carson City company had gained the trust of Devcon when it handled some earlier work at Aces Ballpark in Reno.
From those first contracts at 49ers Stadium, the role of Complete Millwork steadily expanded.
“They needed some help with stuff they couldn’t figure out,” said Stone, who has more than three decades experience in millwork. “We figured it out.”
Working from a 120,000-square-foot facility on Goni Road at the north edge of Carson City, Complete Millwork has crafted high-quality interiors for projects across the world.
Becher notes the company works extensively with The Cheesecake Factory restaurant group and has worked closely with Monarch Casino & Resort Inc. on its Atlantis property in Reno and Monarch Casino Black Hawk in Colorado.
Its recent projects also have included numerous office projects in Silicon Valley.
Further fueling the company’s growth, Stone says, is new equipment that allows the images of wood grain from exotic or expensive species to be digitally printed onto less-expensive hardwood.
“Rather than cut down forests, we simulate them,” he says.
