Tear Away L Bead Testimonial | Detroit High-Rise Case Study

Detroit’s first all-glass residential high-rise, Water Square, is a bold new addition to the Motor City’s skyline. And, if you think the building looks impressive from the outside, you should check out the views from the 10-foot-tall, floor-to-ceiling windows in any one of its nearly 500 apartments.

With all those massive windows, as well as additional modern touches like concrete columns and ceilings, highly skilled finishing work between the drywall and all those other substrates was going to be of vital importance. Thankfully, highly skilled drywall finishers already know there’s only one thing that will quickly, cleanly and seamlessly unite drywall with other architectural details: Trim-Tex’s Tear Away® L Bead, the worldwide gold standard for solving problems like these.

The project: All glass, no room for error

Longtime Detroiters already know the location of the Residences at Water Square as the famous former site of the Joe Louis Arena. This ambitious new development is a feat of engineering that’s as elegantly designed as it was efficiently built: its reinforced concrete structure allowed the 25-story structure — the largest residential high-rise to be built on the Detroit riverfront in decades — to be constructed with remarkable speed.

While the majority of the building’s 496 units are studios and one-bedroom apartments, the many non-drywall elements detailed above posed some real challenges for crews at Brinker Team Construction, the contractor handling the framing and drywall for this project. With the building’s developers promising prospective tenants an upscale lifestyle, the finished drywall needed to be absolutely perfect for each apartment and commercial space — especially when it came to the areas surrounding those centerpiece windows, where the surplus of sunlight would draw attention to each and every flaw or slight gap. And it needed to do all that as fast as possible.

The solution: ‘You just tear it off and you're done!’

For a project like Water Square, where the quantity of your units cannot result in sacrificing the quality of your work, using lots of Tear Away L Bead is practically a prerequisite for commercial contractors. Pro drywallers know to accept no substitutes: Trim-Tex’s Tear Away is the best you can get.

Why? The bead’s high-quality, highly durable vinyl materials allow installers to attain a gorgeous finish that will last for the long haul. When you attach the bead to the drywall, its famous tear-off strip will protect whatever it’s butting up against from unwanted mud or anything else from spilling over onto it. So, there’s no coming back for time-consuming cleanup — a pain in the neck for the installer and costly for the project contractors.

“You can just put it up against something that you don't want another material touching, so it's a nice, clean finish,” says Brinker Team Taper Foreman Tom Moss. “Which makes it easier for us — we don't have to scrape the mud off something that you don't want mud on … It’s a great product. I’ve been using it for years. It saves us a lot of time. It’s nice — you just tear it off and you’re done!”

By using Tear Away L Bead for the drywall around other substrates like the hundreds of floor-to-ceiling windows, ductwork, concrete columns and ceilings found at the Residences at Water Square, the drywall crew at Brinker Team was able to save a staggering amount of time and frustration. Trim-Tex’s Tear Away L Bead was the simple solution for these complex problems that helped the many tradespeople behind this project deliver incredible results under a tight deadline.

The Residences at Water Square is pre-leasing now, and will begin moving in tenants starting February 2024. Thank you to Tom Moss and the folks at Brinker Team Construction for giving us a guided tour of their excellent work. And Tear Away L Bead is just one of the many vinyl drywall accessories Trim-Tex creates to empower commercial contractors like them — request a free copy of the latest catalog to check out everything we’ve got to offer.

Detroit High-Rise: How Tear Away Bead Simplified Stylish Design

The project: All glass, no room for error

The solution: ‘You just tear it off and you're done!’

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