Barely two years after it got out of the gate, a green idea died. In the spring of 2008 architect Daniel Dunzik and a host of green-oriented construction retailers opened Studio Green Design Center on Route 206 in Montgomery.
That enterprise, which sought to be a one-stop shop for anyone looking to build or remodel green, has closed. One of Dunzik’s collaborators in the project was Ronica Sethi, who ran the Princeton-area retail arm of Mythic Paint. Mythic is a Mississippi-based company that is among the first to market zero-VOC paint on the mass market. “You could paint the baby’s walls pink with the baby asleep in the room,” Sethi, a former Manhattan-based investment banker told U.S. 1 two years ago. She also said at the time, “We plan to replicate this. There really should be hundreds of Studio Green Design Centers out there.”
Sethi could not be reached for comment and Dunzik did not return calls to clarify why the center closed. Mythic appears to have no operation in New Jersey at the moment, and part of the reason could have to do with a massive push by home improvement chains like Home Depot and Lowe’s to market very-low and no-VOC paints.
Dunzik has moved his architecture firm to Research Park. He grew up in North Brunswick and studied architecture and engineering at NJIT. Graduating with an architecture degree in 1988, he took a job with a Nassau Street firm and ultimately found the experience unfulfilling. He left to hang his own shingle from a home office in Skillman 10 years ago.
A licensed architect for 19 years, Dunzik is a veteran of both private and public contracts. From an entirely environmental perspective, he says, public projects are far worse than private ones. Public ventures, such as schools, founder in a knotty pile of regulations and public approval. The bottom line looms large in the public sector, where projects must meet budgetary standards and where more expensive environmental considerations are among the first to go.
Daniel W. Dunzik Architect, 308 Wall Street, Princeton 08540; 609-921-0200.
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