Modern Industries Inc.
Owners: Edmund J. Capozzi Jr.,
president, and Edmund J. Capozzi Sr., chairman
Type of business: Contractor
specializing in upscale homes and
custom wood work
Location: 242 West Exchange St.,
Providence
Year founded: 1932
Employees: 40
Annual Revenue: WND
When Modern Industries designs a kitchen, Tony Clarke says, space and style are not the only factors – the customers’ lifestyles matter as well. Some may want a comfortable place to eat breakfast and read the newspaper. Others may only care about the bottom line.
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Whatever they prefer, Modern Industries delivers.
“We’re not trying to fit them into a kitchen,” he says. “We’re trying to build their kitchen around them.”
All of Modern Industries’ work is custom-made. Founded in 1932, the company built its reputation on custom commercial design and wood work, and now it is becoming known for its high-end custom residential construction work.
The company controls the process from start to finish, from the designs, to the construction by master craftsmen, to finishing, to installation.
Working out of a 70,000-square-foot space at 242 Exchange St. since 1938, Modern Industries made its name in the years immediately following Prohibition, said company President Edmund J. “Ned” Capozzi Jr.
The repeal of the U.S. liquor ban in 1933 led to the opening of new restaurants, bars and retail stores – and Italian immigrant Luigi Lamborghini, onetime cabinetmaker to King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, and Pat DeCahaira, Capozzi’s grandfather, helped build them.
Modern Industries designed and built several Providence landmarks from that era, including Scialo Brothers Bakery on Atwells Avenue, Fain’s Fine Carpets & Rugs on North Main Street, and Collier’s Washington Park, a bakery.
When DeCahaira turned the company over to his son-in-law Edmund Capozzi Sr., the company took on more corporate work, said the younger Capozzi, including design and construction of numerous Old Stone Bank buildings. It remained that way after Capozzi Jr. became executive vice president and eventually president during the 1980s, racking up clients including the offices of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and Avon.
In the 1990s, Capozzi said, the company shifted its focus to subcontracted work on high-end residential projects in Connecticut and Rhode Island. In the past two years, it has become primarily a general contractor for high-end residences priced at $1.5 million to $2.5 million.
Capozzi said the company was doing so much of the interior work on subcontracts that it might as well have been doing the entire home. And Capozzi didn’t enjoy being a subcontractor, either, he said.
Now the company is serving residential customers directly. “We bring commercial expertise to the residential process,” he said.
Still, for Capozzi, the key to the company’s capabilities are passion and skill. Workers at the company are able to spot imperfections that never would have affected the end user and can produce a “miter joint that will look good 100 years from now.”
“If you have passion for something, the success will follow,” he said.
According to Marketing Director Christine Putney Capozzi – Ned Capozzi’s wife – there’s very little employee turnover at the company. Father-and-son teams are employed at Modern Industries. And one man, Guido Iannacone, worked at the company for 67 years before passing away recently.
These are master craftsmen, Capozzi Jr. said, who take their work seriously.
“It’s not just money that keeps people happy,” Capozzi said. “It’s the professionalism and the challenge of the work as well.”
Recalling projects that the company has taken on over the years, engineer Paul Altieri said one-of-a-kind items are par for the course. For one customer, for example, Modern Industries built a computer desk to be like a cabinet, so the chair could be completely concealed.
Then there was the customer who wanted her furniture made out of butternut wood. The material turned out to be very rare, Altieri said, but Modern Industries was able to track down the wood and build the room to client’s wishes.
“She’s one of the few people that can say that she has a butternut study,” Altieri said.
