Looking for fresh-shucked oysters and balcony windows, pit beef and crown molding, hot dogs and high-efficiency furnaces?
If you're a builder or contractor, the place to look is the annual Builder Mart, sponsored by the Home Builders Association of Maryland.
A visit to this event, held March 30 at the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium and open to the trade only, is part festival and part serious professional exposition.
While many of the things on display are of interest only to builders, the array of products on view offers a glimpse into the near future of home building and home improvement.
This year's show was the 25th; it featured nearly 400 exhibitors and got nearly 6,000 visitors.
"The show, to us, is two things," said Steve Mannion, accounts manager of B&H Distributing, an appliance distributing company based in Savage. "One, it's getting leads and new business. And two, it's a party atmosphere, a relaxed atmosphere where you can be mingling with other people" who may be customers or competitors.
Here are some things that caught our eye among products home owners can use.
As usual, Karol fell in love with a kitchen. There's one every year that seems to sum up all the best, most current thinking about kitchen design.
This year it was the "Mount Vernon" from Yorktowne, in natural hickory with pierced tin panels on some of the wall cabinets, for a sophisticated, non-kitschy "country" look. The wood was a variegated honey-color -- Yorktowne calls it "amber" -- and the optional panels were black. Two of the kitchen's prominent features -- we sense trends here -- were a cabinet bump-out to allow an oversized stainless steel sink and an end wall cabinet that came all the way down to the counter.
Yorktowne, based in Red Lion, Pa., is also touting its Shaker-style "Hearthside" cabinets; the show display was in maple, another honey-colored wood, and apparently, another trend.
"People are tired of looking at white," said Dean Norris, a Yorktowne salesman. "Every model home has white cabinets." Yorktowne still offers a number of light finishes, but the message the show was variety. "Builders were coming in and asking us for something different, just to show people they had something other than white cabinets."
It's no coincidence that kitchens got a lot of attention at the show.
