Pro's Picks: LP SmartSide

Brent Taylor

Owner, O.C. Taylor   

Raleigh, N.C. 

We’ve been using LP SmartSide Trim and Siding for about five years, and since the company introduced its smooth SmartSide finish last year we’ve been working with it consistently—including on a recent home we did for the Lifetime TV show Designing Spaces. It helps us differentiate ourselves in our market.

The reason we prefer LP’s SmartSide, to put it simply, is because it’s extremely impressive. It’s durable, for one, which is especially important for our clients, as we operate in North Carolina, a hurricane-prone area. SmartSide can withstand gusts up to 200mph, and doesn’t have to sacrifice aesthetics to do it. It also saves on labor. If, for instance, you have a stack of fiber cement boards, a single person can’t carry those—at least not without a high risk of damaging the boards. But SmartSide is as light as it is durable, and so hauling a stack of boards is no problem for one worker. 

For Designing Spaces, we re-sided a 108-year-old home in Wilmington, N.C., which had been damaged by Hurricane Florence. In a lot of ways, it was the perfect home to showcase LP’s SmartSide Smooth Trim and Siding. You have the weather, which SmartSide is built to withstand. But also, LP’s smooth trim and siding looks so much like natural wood that it works on historical homes trying to maintain the historical aesthetic. And what the homeowners especially appreciate is that SmartSide comes in 16-foot boards, allowing for fewer seams on the house.

I believe in it so much I have it on my own home.