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C3 Design ships its first suite
By KATHRYN EASTBURN
Staff Writer | Posted: Sunday, June 12, 2016 2:00 am
C3 Design’s newest superstar has left the building.
Greenwood-based design firm C3, the brain child
of Viking Range founder Fred Carl Jr., shipped its
first manufactured hospitality suite to Omaha,
Nebraska, on Friday morning.
The launch of the hospitality suite, designed and
built by Carl and his team at their Cypress Street
factory, heralds further production of more of these
suites as well as a line of camp houses and park
houses — small, comfortable cottages that can be
either mobile or erected on a permanent site.
GameDay Traditions, a Georgia-based company
that is aiming to take tailgating and other
celebratory gatherings to a new level, has
purchased nine of C3’s mobile hospitality suites.
The first three will be set up at the College World
Series baseball tournament in Omaha next week.
Once the dust has settled on that party, the units
will move to the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials, also in
Omaha.
Brian Waldrop
Brian Waldrop, CEO of C3 Design, heads
the team at the Greenwood factory on
Cypress Street.
“My partnership with Fred Carl began in a previous life,” said GameDay CEO Tim Watson. “I
used to build the show houses for Southern Living magazine and knew Fred and his Viking
appliances there.
“Then when I came up with this idea of providing mobile hospitality suites, I saw a press release
for Fred’s new company, and I called him immediately.”
Carl and his Greenwood crew — Matt Finke, product manager; Todd Goss, design coordinator;
Brian Waldrop, CEO of C3; and Ron Ussery, director of production — understood his vision,
Watson said.
“I’m 50 years old, which means I’ve been tailgating at Southern football games for about 49
years,” Watson said.
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“Seventy-five percent of the experience of going to a college game goes on outside the game. It’s
the highlight of the year, and people want and need heat or air conditioning, a bathroom with a
toilet that flushes, a place to eat and drink and a premium viewing experience.”
Marry that vision with the design vision of C3 for clean, contemporary lines, high-end building
materials, nice appliances and efficient use of space, and you’ve got the sleek little building on
wheels that rolled out of C3’s Cypress Street plant on Friday.
The suite features a spacious and welcoming front porch; a main room with granite countertops
along the walls; multi-paned windows; a kitchen with a warming oven and side-by-side
refrigerator-freezer; a pass-through kitchen window for grilling on the outside beneath a roll-out
awning or pop-up tents; and a nice bathroom.
The hospitality suite also is outfitted to include four flat-screen televisions: one in the main room,
one on the outside wall, one in the kitchen and yes, one in the bathroom.
“You don’t want to miss an important play,” said Finke.
The next six units purchased by GameDay will go to the University of Kentucky and will be
custom designed to look a little more Kentuckian — blue, with a cupola like a thoroughbred
horse barn.
From UK, those units can go to the race track, next year’s Kentucky Derby, festivals and
weddings, Watson said.
The hospitality suites designed and built by C3 can accommodate 30 people and will be featured
on travelchannel.com and HGTV.com this fall in a tailgating special, Watson said.
The hospitality suites may seem a far cry from Carl’s previously announced plans for high-end
modular homes, but this entity will support the other, Waldrop said.
In 2015, C3 bought established modular home manufacturer Franklin Homes of Russellville,
Alabama, and it now uses the plant there to continue making manufactured homes but utilizing
more contemporary design and better building materials. That company will continue to be
referred to as Franklin.
“The Franklin plant will continue to make more traditional full-size homes like they have been,
but we will be introducing some new designs to their product line,” said Carl in an email. “For
now, C3 (in Greenwood) will focus on smaller homes, cottages and cabins, both traditional and
contemporary, but will probably move into larger contemporary homes in the future.”
The Greenwood plant, headquarters of C3 Design, is currently staffed by seven employees and
seven local contractors. Its operations will expand in the coming year as C3 receives its building
certifications from the federal government, and that is expected to happen in the next two weeks.
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“(Our) original vision was to make high-end contemporary homes,” Waldrop said. “We still plan
to do that here, but we found other markets that need suppliers and where we can refine our
product.”
Camp houses are fundamentally mobile homes a little larger than 400 square feet, built to HUD
code. The park model, on wheels, is a mobile home of less than 400 square feet built to RV code.
The park and camp houses fall into the same category as the tiny house craze, Waldrop said, but
with a Carl twist.
“What we’re doing is building these units with efficient use of space, very cool design elements
and attractive building materials. And they can be used in a variety of different manners,” said
Waldrop.
A duck camp. A fishing camp. A retreat next to a lake. A home in the woods. A place to retreat in
your own backyard. A very basic camp house might sell for as little as $50,000 but could cost
significantly more depending upon building materials and customized features.
Carl’s design hand is evident.
Some of those features might include metal ceilings or painted metal ceilings, hardwood or
laminate floors, built-in shelving and drawers. A rusted corrugated metal ceiling has recently been
incorporated into the design possibilities.
All of the camp and park houses feature full-size appliances and roomy bathrooms with 48-inch
showers.
A model recently shown at the Tupelo Manufactured Housing Show featured Southern yellow
pine tongue-and-groove walls.
Building 40 to 50 of these houses the first year in the Greenwood plant would be a reasonable
goal, said Waldrop. That would require at least 20 more workers, said Ussery, who added that the
company contracts with local companies for numerous services such as granite countertops,
electrical wiring and roofing.
“Our sales staff said they could sell 35 of these homes immediately if we could make them,” said
Waldrop.
By purchasing Franklin, C3 now has access to the company’s existing dealers and a sales force.
C3 also owns HomeFront Home Improvement Centers and its three Mississippi stores in
Greenwood, Winona and Carthage, giving them immediate access to high-end appliances,
fixtures, paints and other materials required for increased production.
All of it leads to Fred Carl’s vision of high-end modular homes: quality, well-designed houses
built in pieces at a factory, customized to an owner’s taste and assembled on the site of the
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owners’ dreams.
In the case of custom hospitality suites and camp and park houses, for now, the place where it’s
happening is Greenwood.
To learn more about GameDay Traditions, visit www.gamedaytraditions.com. For more on C3, see
www.c3designinc.net.
•Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
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