Tim Sprinkle

The Richmond-made Hendricks tile roof

Virginia Living
June 2006

Every city has its signature building style. In Charleston it's the white columned porch, in New York the brownstone, and in Richmond it may well be the Hendricks tile roof. Locally manufactured for more than 80 years, these concrete roofing tiles have become as commonplace in the River City as dogwood trees and summer humidity, protecting generations of Virginians from the elements with a distinctive, subdued style.

But wait a second – concrete, as a roofing surface, in the city's toniest neighborhoods? Even after nearly a century in business, the tile makers themselves admit that the concept of a concrete roof can be hard to grasp at first. But these roofs are a Mid-Atlantic institution, installed on more homes and buildings than many people realize, and the product's reputation for quality speaks for itself.

"It's a different sort of look," says Clem Ulrichs, owner of Richmond Precast Concrete Products, the manufacturer of the Hendricks tile, "but it's a traditional style based on the colonial look of shake or slate. It gives you a thickness that you can see, kind of an old world texture, and people really like that."

Builders like it too, especially when they want a durable, long-lasting roof for their clients. The handmade tiles can ape just about anything from wood to slate, depending on which color and texture options the customer chooses, and offer up to 80 years of maintenance-free service. Not a bad trick for a building material that's more often associated with sidewalks and stadiums than high-end custom homes.

"The Mid-Atlantic is a lot more rigorous on concrete than it would be say up in Canada, where it gets cold and it stays cold," Ulrichs says. “You may have two or three freeze-thaw cycles over a winter up there, but down here it's every day, freezing at night and 40 degrees during the day. It adds a lot of wear and tear on the concrete, and that's why we make it so strong."

Regardless of the options, though, Hendricks tile is still made very much the same way it was in the 1920s. From workshop to jobsite, the tiles still consist of little more than sand, water, steel reinforcements, and colored iron oxide, slowly cured in the Richmond Precast lot off of Bells Road to allow for maximum hardening.

"It's a pretty simple process," Ulrichs explains, "Basically we take the mortar, stick it on the assembly line, then trawl it off and put a couple of stainless steel reinforcements in. Then we do the texture on each tile and the color; then cut it into tiles. It’s very basic manufacturing, been around forever.”

But don't let the simplicity fool you. Making concrete that looks like wood or stone is as much an art form as it is an industry. It takes workers hours to hand craft the thousands of tiles that go onto a typical roof, a job that could easily be done by a machine in a fraction of the time. For Ulrichs, though, the proof is in the product.

"When you look at the tile you say, 'well, that doesn't look like a shake,'" he says, "but when you put it on a roof it looks just like one from the ground. The key is to match the color and the texture and the thickness of it."

And, these days, historical accuracy is an important part of the Hendricks business. The tiles can be found on historic structures up and down the Mid-Atlantic, ranging from Culpeper’s [TK – this house was profiled in the October issue and I'm drawing a total blank on the name. Do you have a back issue handy?] to the Rockefeller estate in Westchester, New York. The concrete tiles are so convincing, in fact, that they’ve been installed on a number of buildings and homes in Colonial Williamsburg, as well.

“Five or six years ago, Williamsburg decided to start replacing all of their old roofs, and they came back to Hendricks tile," explains former owner John Lees, who bought the business from the Hendricks family in 1985. "So we've been doing a lot of work down there: the Magazine, Merchant's Square, and now we're staring to do all of the smaller buildings in the tourist area along Duke of Gloucester Street."

Hendricks tile as a building material can be traced all the way back to the mid-1920s, when builders were reassembling Agecroft Hall in Richmond's West End. After shipping the 15th century structure from England, engineers realized that several parts of the house had been damaged in transit and that they needed more Cotswold stone slabs to complete the roof. Rather than track down new pieces of the hard-to-find stone, they turned to local concrete caster William Hendricks to create the needed replacements.

Fortunately for Hendricks, the Agecroft project coincided with the development of Richmond’s upscale Windsor Farms neighborhood, and before long new residents were beating down his door to get concrete tiles for their own homes.

“A lot of the homes in Windsor Farms were modeled on that Tudor look of Agecroft," Lees says, “and people wanted the same roofing tiles.”

These days, finding a Hendricks tile roof in the Richmond area is just a matter of knowing where to look – from private homes along the James River, to the Country Club of Virginia, to commercial properties like the River Road Shopping Center.

And it doesn’t stop there. Richmond Precast supplies custom handmade roofing tiles to builders all over the country – from the Carolinas to Washington state – although their market remains focused on the Mid-Atlantic.

"People see Colonial Williamsburg and say, 'we want to build a colonial house and we like that roof,'" Ulrichs says, "so we've got a lot of custom homebuilders calling us saying, 'can you do what you did in Colonial Williamsburg? It's a basic niche, but it's pretty consistent. If you like slate you're going to want real slate, but this gives more of an earthier look. It's hard, it's durable, and it's going to last you a long time."