About Us
Our Core VALUES
CLIENT EXPERIENCE
Prioritize communication, understand client needs, and deliver personalized solutions that exceed expectations.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Take ownership of your work and be responsible for your actions as well as your performance.
ADAPTABILITY
Be flexible and responsive to changing circumstances. Adapt and overcome.
INNOVATION
Encourage new ideas, methodologies, processes and technologies in an effort to improve efficiency. Embrace creativity and forward-thinking solutions.
INTEGRITY
Consistently act in an ethical and honest manner, with both clients and teammates.
COMMUNICATION
Actively listen and ensure all perspectives are valued. Take accountability for words / actions in communication, and be concise and transparent.
TEAM APPROACH
Foster collaboration among our team, architects, trade partners, and clients to ensure a cohesive and efficient process.
QUALITY
Be dedicated to producing results that meet the highest standards of excellence, skill, and attention to detail. Take pride in one’s craft, striving for precision and continuously improving one’s skills to deliver industry-leading results.
Our HISTORY
Nick Kornea was a part-time carpenters apprentice after school and through college. Starting from 2014 LBK was founded.
Nick founded Luxury Bath and Kitchens Inc. (our roots or former company name) in 2014. Our intention was to only focus on kitchen and bath projects. At the time, Nick felt that smaller projects were more manageable, easier to track, and easier to control costs.
As we got started, we became popular somewhat quickly and needed to hire additional support staff. Nick also recognized that we would be better off controlling the design process and vendor purchases in-house. Nick's wife, Joanna, also joined the team as a full-time COO, and has since been involved in design, project management, and sales. Today, she is our full-time Operations Manager and estimator.
In 2015, we added field staff as we were a "self-performing" company when it came to working in the field. We did carpentry, drywall, flooring, electric, plumbing, etc. all in-house. We were about 75% field staff and 25% office.
Additionally, in 2015, we found a small 1200 sq. ft. space in Horsham that we made into our showroom/design center. As a result, we were able to become a "kitchen and bath" dealer.
For the first couple of years, designers also served as salespeople. While the model worked at first, we began to learn that designers typically do not want to stress out over sales and numbers. They tend to want to design, go figure.
One of our earliest designers became Nick's important design mentor, Will Hill. Hill taught him important details about KTB design that we practice today. Designers are no longer sales people as they are artistically driven so they can keep their focus there.
In 2017, we hired our first full-time, salaried kitchen and bath designer, Joe Makarewicz. Joe moved to production and project management is still at team LBK!
Rough year economically for many of us in our industry. We knew we needed to do something different. Nick made the best decision of his career and in 2018 joined a group called "Remodelers Advantage". RA has helped us tremendously with our processes, financials, and overall best business practices. We are still a part of the RA family.
In 2018, we understood the need to add another (interior) designer to support Joe. Adding an interior designer to our staff gave us a different perspective to design as our work started spilling over into adjacent rooms of the kitchen and bath areas. We also added on a full time bookkeeper, Beth Gallagher. She is still with us today and is now our Controller.
We became a design-build firm and treated the design phase as an independent process leading up to construction. Rather than quote free estimates, we started designing and budgeting projects in one cohesive process.
In 2020, we were hit hard with the Covid shut down. Right after the shutdown, we were asked by a past client to remodel their bathrooms. In speaking with them, we learned that before they called us for the bathrooms, they had their basement finished successfully by another contractor. Nick learned he was losing out on business simply because of the name.
As a result, Nick rebranded and we changed our name to LBK Design Build. In that process, we also started to truly follow design build firm principles.
In April of 2021 we made a commitment to our current headquarters. With an 1800's building, we knew it would be extensive and expensive, but we really wanted to have our own home. The overall design end goal was to get our team a comfortable and pleasant work environment and to provide our clients with a warm and inspirational experience.
We made a lot of progress with the building renovations and were able to move out of the Warminster warehouse location and into our offices at our new HQ in March 2022. Once we moved in, we continued with renovations to design space (4,000 sq. ft.)