The finished appearance of your home's "curb appeal" and its architecture is determined between 60% to 75% by the style, texture, and thickness of the roofing material installed.

Your selection of roofing material for your new home or      re-roof goes way beyond simple colour choice. A world of styles, textures, thickness options, and colour awaits. 

Don't discount the significance of your roofing selection. Imagine the change in style of a home if a homeowner put on cheap vinyl siding or metal cladding on its exterior, while his two neighbours had a stucco finish on one house, and the other had brick and stone. The house in the middle may have identical framing and structure, but the difference in style is obvious. The same importance lies in the roofing material choice.

If you look at homes in Scottsdale Arizona, Newport California, or Las Vegas Nevada, most homes have a Southwest look and character. Yet the style is mostly determined from the Villa and Spanish Tiles crowning the roof. An identical frame style home finished with plain looking 3-tab shingles would look lost between two homes with Spanish Tiles on the roof. It may have the same interior finishing, and identical exterior wall finishing and structural frame look, but the roof difference would make that home "seem" less valuable and less appealing. The real estate value of that home would represent tens of thousands in difference, even though the roofing budget only changed by a few thousand dollars.

Often for as little as the cost of some "plumbing fixture" upgrades, a better looking and better working roof system can be provided. The roofing material style and quality choice is one of the most important decisions when building or re-roofing, and the single most important "curb appeal" upgrade the consumer can add to their home. In short, it delivers the best "bang" for the buck.

One can also obtain an executive class look from their home similar to real cedar or real slate, using asphalt shingles. Not the thinner looking shingles that shingle manufacturers call "30 year or 40 year" laminates. Those shingles are basic builder's grade shingles that are not very thick and don't add much character to a home. What we mean is super-thick architectural shingles such as Landmark "TL" or Presidential "TL" Super Shakes. These two stylish shingles represent real thickness and real texture.

Unlike "30 year or 40 year" laminates which try to fool you into thinking they are thicker than they are by "painting" shadow lines on the shingles, Landmark TL and Presidential TL really are thick.  They distinguish a home with executive class texture and deliver a realistic wood shake or slate look. They also just happen to include a Lifetime Warranty and Copper Granules to resist Algae growth and Algae Stains.

If you design a roofing system that includes ridge venting under fancy shake-look high-definition ridge caps on both the hips and the ridges, you can make a Landmark TL roof look so real that it can fool many people into thinking they are looking at real wood shakes. These fancy shingles will provide the curb appeal and executive class looks that create a higher value looking home and property.

New asphalt shingle designs are also creating the classic look and appeal of slate. Certainteed's Centennial Slate is a unique real slate look with unique blended-slate colours and an outstanding new shingle format that includes a full double layer of heavy fiberglass reinforcement in its super shangle design. Also available in this architectural look is the Grand Manor, Consumer Reports number one rated shingle. Either of these shingles will add grandeur and heritage style to your roof and building.

Just as we earlier discussed, you can change the appearance, esthetic appeal, and potentially the real market value of your home with the roofing selection you make. And this goes for asphalt shingles as well. If you put Presidential TL, Landmark TL or Centennial Slate on three houses and you put "30 year or 40 year" laminated shingles on the neighboring three homes, there would be an outstanding difference in the looks of the homes even if the frame style was identical. Three of the homes would look far more luxurious with rich looking architecture even though we only changed the texture and style of the roofing. An investment of only $1000 to $5000 could reward the homeowner with a huge real estate value improvement. The homes with a more executive class or carriage house look will always fetch more dollars than those that have that cheap builder's grade appeal.

You would probably invest $1000 to $5000 in upgrades on your electrical or plumbing fixtures and appliances with out a second thought. Yet the most critical factor in home design, its roof design and texture, is far too often overlooked or given inadequate concern. You can change electrical lighting or plumbing fixtures almost anytime, but your roofing choice will hopefully be a multi-generation long lasting choice, and it can "make or break" the look and style of your home.

And we are discussing normal value homes and real estate. If you are building a country estate or a luxury property, where the values are beyond $600,000 to $30,000,000 the roof you choose to create the final architectural design may significantly affect the market value. Estate look properties need to have estate look roofing materials, not cheap or thin composition shingles.

There are also new genres of roofing materials which accurately simulate real materials such as slate and wood shakes. These include DaVinci Slate and Shake, RoofRoc Slate, Infiniti Shakes, Madera Shake, and Ever-Shake.

The Infiniti Shake comes in both Class C and Class A Fire rated versions, that are produced from re-cycled rubber tires and polymers. They include 3 widths and various molds that simulates real wood, but are far more durable and lasts longer. Infiniti Shakes come with pre-made ridge caps for easy installation and wood shake looks.

DaVinci accurately simulates real random width slate. It's very authentic looking right down to the coarse texture on the surface, but these are tremendously light and very walkable compared to the real quarried slate. DaVinci now also offers their exciting new DaVinci Shake with subtle colour blends and the texture of medium thickness real cedar shakes.

RoofRoc is made to look like thinner slate with a smooth uniform style. They are made locally in BC and therefore cost less than DaVinci. It is made from Limestone and crushed plastic.

CedarLite is a lightweight concrete roof tile designed to re-roof old wood shakes. They are about the same weight as wet cedar shakes. They are quite costly, they are fragile, they are no longer warranted or sold above the California northern border such as in Oregon, Washington State, or Canada. We now advise caution on this product as a result of this move by Monierlifetile as they must be harboring some concerns on this product. The look is great but we need performance and warranty as well.

A cheaper, heavier, and better constructed version of the CedarLite tile is available for new construction called Madera Tiles. They are much stronger and have the same qualities one expects from any colour-through concrete roofing tile. These tiles reflect the "Ultimate Thickness and Texture" that defines an authentic wood hand-split shake. There is no other concrete roof tile that even comes close to the Madera for the realistic wood look these tiles provide. For re-roofing an engineer should be consulted to verify its use on an existing structure, but it could be a great product for re-roofing if the building will support its moderate weight.

If you are one of many homeowners who currently own or reside in a multi-family detached town-home, and that currently has cedar shakes or shingles on the roofs, you will need to seriously consider your roofing choice as well. Far too many strata groups are making the choice to change their cedar shakes to thin "30 year or 40 year type shingles" when re-roofing the buildings. Their choice was determined too often by "30 years is good enough", rather than which roofing material will keep up the current value of my town-home units by better replicating the true look and appeal of the wood that is being removed. When they bought the units they had an executive class or west-coast natural style, but after re-roofing with thinner asphalt shingles their complexes now look cheaper, less appealing, and may now be worth less.

Clearly, the original wood roofs look great as a roofing or home design style in most peoples opinion. But real wood does not last very long anymore, it is relatively expensive, it can be expensive to maintain, and it has very poor fire rating (if any). So the goal should be to seek a roofing product that has a realistic appeal, is within a town-home owner's group budget allowance, and provide a long term durability.

By investing $1000 to $5000 more per unit in better roofing texture from super thick shingles such as Landmark "TL" or Presidential "TL", the town-home complex can retain an elegant look and style, but still achieve a greater reliability than real wood with a lot less investment than real wood requires. This is important for both your current enjoyment, your pride of ownership, and the potential resale value within the next five to ten years, never mind thirty years.

Always remember that roofing consultants generally focus on waterproofing selection, less on colour selection, and provide almost no focus on how the style of the roofing materials will contribute to the architectural look and design of the project as a hole. They would be OK with specifying Torch-On Rolled Roofing if you would allow them as this "farm look" commercial roofing membrane would work from their weatherproofing perspective.

We welcome town-home owners, strata group roofing committees, as well as single family home owners, to come on down to educate yourselves on your important roofing material choices and roofing systems. And you should not let your "management" company make these selections as it is your investment, not theirs, and you must protect it plus it is you who will enjoy living within its design and style (or not). These management companies usually "punt" the decision off to a "consultant" who make the choice in the way we have earlier described above. They normally do this to avoid liability for choosing the wrong roofing or building envelope system, and they still get to charge their management fee for the work that others will perform, we presume.

If you believe that you need to hire anyone to create a roofing specification, we suggest that you first start with a design consultant specializing in exterior design, or an architect, to determine the best style choice first. We can assist the designer or yourselves in roofing texture options and selections that could be chosen for your project. Then, one can develop a specification for installation and materials of the roofing system selected. Don't put the cart before the horse.

Enjoy utilizing our showrooms in the rest of this website, our re-roofing budgets, as well as the links to other useful manufacturer's sites. Please educate and discover the many style choices available for you to make the correct or best architectural decision for your project.

A world of choices are available in the Lower Mainland market. Sometimes there are so many choices that the consumer can be confused. At our showroom we like to change this confusion into simple easy choices for materials that best suit your home and neighborhood's architecture, your budget, and your expectations for performance, warranty,  appearance, and preferred style.