Steady business

For nearly four decades, Channel City Lumber, a family-owned and operated lumber yard and hardware store in Goleta, has helped area residents with their building and home improvement projects.

Founder Henry John Tillia II, a geologist and Santa Barbara area native, landed in the lumber and hardware industry in 1963 when he jumped at the opportunity to buy a lumber yard in Santa Barbara on property currently occupied by Fess Parker’s Doubletree Resort. He re-christened the yard Channel City Lumber and the family enterprise was born.

A couple of years later, Tillia purchased two acres of land at the end of Aero Camino Road in Goleta and established a second location complete with a TrueValue hardware store. He stocked everything from nuts, bolts, power tools and plumbing supplies to housewares and lawn and garden materials.

“It has stayed the same type of business throughout the years,” said Troy Stewart, grandson of the founder and the lumber yard’s current owner. Stewart took the reins when his father, Henry John Tillia III, retired in 1998. “It started out as a relatively small lumber yard, but so was everyone else in the business at that time,” he said.

In the late 1980s, when Parker began construction on his Red Lion Resort on property he had previously leased to Channel City Lumber, the Santa Barbara location was forced to close and the family concentrated on the Goleta yard.

While that facility hasn’t grown in terms of square feet, it has expanded its inventory to meet the changing needs and requirements of the marketplace.

For example, two-and-a-half years ago the company abandoned its stock of lumber treated and preserved with chromated copper arsensate (CCA), acid copper chromate (ACC) and other hazardous compounds in favor of the environmentally friendly ACQ grade. Combining an alkaline, recycled copper and quat, ACQ produces an environmentally advanced wood

preservative free of potentially dangerous arsenic and chromium. State law requires Channel City Lumber and all other lumber retailers to make the transition by 2003, but the local company chose to do so four years earlier than necessary.

In addition, Channel City Lumber features water-based paints, stains and mineral spirits “to be environmentally sensitive,” Stewart said.

Given its size and competition with home improvement giants such as Home Depot in Camino Real Marketplace and Orchard Supply Hardware in the Fairview Shopping Center, Channel City Lumber battles for its share of the consumer market and credits its longevity to customer service and satisfaction, according to Stewart.

“A good experience or a bad experience is as much a part of the sale as a fairly priced product is,” he said.

“Whether customers spend 40 cents or $400 you have to treat them the same. That’s been one of our goals. We don’t have the fortune to rely just on products. We have to rely on our reputation and customer service.”

Steady business

For Channel City Lumber, helping area residents with building and home improvement projects is all in a life’s work.