In its first year in business, Upstate Door took on a job an architect had struggled to place anywhere else. The design called for a round-top door with sidelights on either side and a round-top transom arching over the whole arrangement. Robert Fontaine, the President and Owner of Upstate Door, remembers the conversation well. “They said, ‘you probably can’t do this,’ and we did,” he tells us.
25 years on, the Warsaw, New York manufacturer of fine wood doors and windows employs over 90 people, operates approximately 100,000 square feet of manufacturing space in Western New York, has invested in a robotic finishing line, and has expanded its window capabilities through a Boston-area operation. It has opened a state-of-the-art corporate office headquarters complete with a showroom, as well as a new Design Center in Nantucket. And now, the questions have changed—oversized doors, trendy new hardware, and intricate details on buildings more than a century old are all part of a normal week. But the appetite for solving that kind of problem is the same as it was at the time of the company’s founding.
Fontaine launched Upstate Door in May 2001 with a short customer list of custom home builders, architects, interior designers, and high-end building material dealers. The first location was a 12,000-square-foot facility in Cowlesville, New York. By 2003, the company had outgrown it and moved into a 46,000-square-foot building in Warsaw, where it is still headquartered.
Making a good wood door was the baseline. The ambition was to become the place people called when a project was complex or unusual. “We wanted to be a company where people could come to have something different or difficult to accomplish,” Fontaine says. The company’s first tagline, Distinctive Door Solutions, came straight out of that idea. At the ultra-high end of residential work, he explains, nothing is simple, and the architects he spoke with in those early years had no shortage of problems that needed solving.
The company grew from a handful of employees into a team of more than 90, and it did so in steps. In 2008 it added impact, fire, bifold, and lift-and-slide doors to broaden what it could offer. In 2015 it installed a solar array at the Warsaw plant. In 2017, the company launched Fine Finishing Solutions, a factory finishing program designed to provide greater finish consistency while saving time on jobsites.
That shift fed into what the company now calls Designed for Distinction®, which Fontaine describes as an evolution of the original idea. “We’re still solving challenges, but we’re involved much earlier in the design process,” he says. An architect, builder, or designer might arrive with a drawing, a photograph, a historical detail, or only an idea. Questions about proportions, profiles, species, hardware, finishing, and performance follow, and the Upstate Door team works through them with the customer. That process of taking an architectural idea and working collaboratively through the details is at the heart of where Designed for Distinction comes alive.
Fontaine points to the company’s three pillars of Rapid Collaboration, Concierge Service, and Enduring Generations. Rapid Collaboration reflects the company’s ability to bring customers and its internal experts together quickly to work through complex design and construction details. Concierge Service describes the hands-on support provided throughout a project, from early design discussions through production and delivery. Enduring Generations reflects the goal of creating products that are built to endure—both physically and architecturally, to which end Fontaine says the products are meant to belong in the home long after its owners have moved on.
The company’s footprint has grown through acquisition as well as from the ground up. In 2011, Upstate Door bought Sun Dor, a door maker in Newton, Kansas, and moved its equipment to New York. The same year it bought a 50,000-square-foot building in Castile, which became its second manufacturing site. The Sun Dor products turned into a new line in 2013, Sun Dor Classics, renamed Classic Door Solutions in 2016.
Today, Upstate Door’s primary manufacturing operations are based in Warsaw and Castile, New York, with its Boston-area operation providing additional window expertise and capabilities. The workforce spreads across the shop floor, office, and the field, where business developers work with architects and builders.
Perhaps the most significant expansion in Upstate Door’s 25 year history is now underway: fine wood windows. That expansion accelerated in 2024 with the acquisition of Architectural Openings, a Boston, Massachusetts-based custom window and door company founded in 1987. The acquisition brought decades of window knowledge and craftsmanship into Upstate while providing a foundation for developing a broader window offering. Fontaine’s reason for the acquisition is practical. Customers have asked for wood windows for years, Fontaine says, and the company’s old tagline, ‘Fine Door Solutions, One Source,’ left an obvious gap. Upstate Door could handle everything on the door side in wood, yet any project that needed wood windows too meant matching its profiles to another manufacturer’s product. “Lots of times, when we only did doors, we were matching the profiles to the windows to the other manufacturers,” he explains. “So now we can match it easily, because we can do both ourselves.”
The larger vision is to design doors and windows as one—carrying proportions, profiles, species, finishes and architectural details consistently throughout a home. Rather than treating doors and windows as separate product categories, the goal is to help architects think about them as part of one architectural composition. While many manufacturers offer windows and exterior doors, fewer can carry those same details into custom interior doors. For Fontaine, that creates an opportunity to help architects and designers establish continuity from the exterior architecture through the interior spaces.” Plenty of companies make windows and exterior doors but skip interiors. “It’s the concept of taking your masterpiece that you might have in one room and combining it through the whole house,” says Fontaine. When a project runs from the front entry through to the custom interior doors and every profile lines up, the result is a source of real pride.
Upstate Door has historically concentrated on markets it can serve with its own delivery fleet, minimizing product handling and helping protect highly customized products in transit. That footprint has continued to expand along the East Coast and into selected Midwest markets.
The company’s geographic reach has continued to expand, particularly along the East Coast, with growing activity in markets from New England through Florida as well as selected Midwest markets. The aim is ease of ordering for complex projects, and Fontaine explains that most of the industry measures with the wrong clock, with lead time typically counted from sign-off. But every Upstate Door job comes with drawings, and the time to produce a proposal, issue those drawings, and get them aligned with the architect and builder takes real time too. Investment in software has shortened that stretch, which lowers the overall wait from the first quote request to a finished product.
The next step is entering a job’s details once and sending them straight to the factory floor. That cuts the chance of errors and gives the company consistency on difficult work, Fontaine says.
On the floor itself, the team recently invested in a robotic finishing line. The new line incorporates a six-axis robotic sprayer designed to scan each door or window to learn its depth and applies the finish consistently. A second robot picks up doors that can weigh 100 to 200 pounds and flips them, a task that used to take several people, and CNC routers have already taken hands away from blades. The company’s long-running approach to handling heavy products has the same purpose. Fontaine wants fewer injuries and less exhaustion, and he wants employees using their minds on the production floor rather than only their backs. “We’re utilizing the mind in combination with the handwork to get something special,” he says.
The result is a range organized around three product lines, each designed around a different level of customization while maintaining Upstate’s standards for construction and craftsmanship. Classic offers a curated selection of profiles, species, and options, allowing greater efficiency and value while remaining made to order. Distinctive opens the possibilities considerably, with extensive choices in profiles, dimensions, species, finishes, and architectural details. Tailored is reserved for highly specialized solutions developed collaboratively around unique architectural, performance, or project requirements—often for designs that fall outside conventional product offerings. Fontaine says architects continue to push the limits of what can be built, and projects that fall outside conventional manufacturing capabilities are often where Upstate’s collaborative approach becomes most valuable. The more a design pushes, the more likely something unexpected shows up.
In practice, a finished door reflects dozens of decisions made earlier. Material selection comes first, including color match and grain patterns. Then comes the construction method, the type of glue, dowels, machining precision, sanding, and fitting. Finishing comes last.
Historical work puts all those skills to the test. When a door needs to match one that is 100 to 150 years old, Upstate Door may bring the original back to the shop and, sometimes, cut it apart. A century of repainting can leave 10 or more coats on a door, and the profiles under that paint rarely match anything. Cutting the door open shows what is underneath.
One such project sits close to home. Fontaine studied at SUNY Geneseo, a short drive from the shop, and when the college called about a historical door match, he worked directly with the architect and builder on the specifications. He recommended a construction method that would stop the panel from cracking. The team insisted the original was solid oak, a common material in Western New York, so they pulled the panel out to examine. It was veneered, which explained why it had never cracked and matched what Fontaine had recommended. The door is now a spot where graduates have photos taken.
In terms of sustainability practices, the company pays close attention to responsible wood sourcing and can incorporate FSC-certified materials where project requirements call for them, while the finish is a water-based Italian product, which Fontaine says is safer for employees and suits New York, where spraying urethanes is difficult. Sawdust and scrap are ground up and sent to local farms as cow bedding, in a county he jokes has more cows than people. The solar array at Warsaw, installed in 2015, was the first in town, and it has since grown to roughly four acres, feeding the grid. Fontaine says it alone comes close to covering what the Warsaw facility uses.
The rural setting does bring challenges in hiring, Fontaine shares, since graduates don’t find a big-city environment in Warsaw. But people with a love for nature tend to feel right at home. The company runs internships with colleges, primarily on the office side in engineering, drafting, sales, and accounting, and several current employees started as interns. It also trains people for the shop, looking for alignment with its culture, a strong work ethic, and a willingness to learn. 30-plus high school students from the local BOCES program have toured the plant.
As Upstate enters its next 25 years, Fontaine sees the company evolving from its roots as a custom door manufacturer into a broader architectural resource—bringing fine wood doors and windows together with design collaboration, craftsmanship, and increasingly sophisticated manufacturing technology. Technology and automation will play a larger role in how products are designed and manufactured, but he doesn’t see them replacing craftsmanship. Instead, the goal is to give the company’s people better tools, improve consistency, and create more time for the collaboration and problem-solving that have defined Upstate from the beginning.
Asked what he is proudest of after 25 years, Fontaine answers without hesitation: the people. Many of them have built their careers at Upstate Door and, he says, sometimes spend more waking hours there than at home. After the people he cites the accomplishments of the company, and then the team’s willingness to keep adjusting and adapting, whether to new materials, new hardware, or new technology.
Looking back on what the company has built since 2001, Fontaine says, “In some ways, it’s very humbling. The shop has more people, more years of experience, and more technology than it did at the start, but the foundation still remains.”
A round-top door with a round-top transom was enough to make one architect assume the job couldn’t be done. 25 years later, Upstate Door still hears that kind of doubt and still treats it as an invitation. Its team has grown from a handful of people in Cowlesville to more than 90 individuals across five facilities, yet the habit of saying yes to the hard job has stayed put. For any builder or homeowner with a design that others have turned down, the company’s story offers a simple reminder: the right partner can turn “you probably can’t” into a door someone walks through for generations.
