“At the trade fair, he was like ‘I need staff and you’re it,’” she says with a laugh.
Afterward, they launched a Website, and orders quickly came in from California, Colorado, Texas and other American states. There was a clear demand overseas. The Shanahans started attending trade shows in the U.S., where they met a man from Scottsdale who convinced them the city was a mecca of people with fine tastes and big remodeling budgets.
The Shanahans now live in the Phoenix area, meeting with clients by appointment in their Scottsdale showroom. Their average entrance door costs $8,000 to $12,000; basic interior doors start at $1,500. Clients can look at a variety of doors on display – including the ones that sent British architects into a tizzy – and use them as a starting point to customize their dream entrance. Siobhán, a talented artist, sketches the designs.
Then, an artisan on the other side of the world, who has learned his craft in another language and mastered it – and whom Shanahan has contracted with – will craft the doors and send them to Phoenix. The process essentially is the antithesis of picking out furniture at Ikea.
“This is all about selling the talent of what our guys do in Spain and Italy,” Shanahan says. “The Italian guys work for the Pope. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for Paradise Valley. They are the best of the best.”
Yet, American tastes can be fickle. Shanahan has found that people here will “pay through the nose on a dining room table but not an entrance door.” And there is pressure from architects to cut costs in order to compete with mass-produced furnishings. Mare Nostrum is considering selling hollow interior (not entrance) doors to stay competitive.
Part of the market’s fickleness is cultural, Siobhán says. Here, a door may just be a door. But in many towns throughout Europe, a door is a family’s fingerprint. “Door nerds” can pinpoint the region a family is from by just examining the entrance.
“When you’re in Spain, it’s hard to get away from doors – they’re very pretty,” she says. “In Spain and Italy, they’ll spend a lot of money on it because it’s the first thing and the last thing people see.”