H&H Painting Co. Wins PCA Best Interior Commercial Project of 2026 Award
On most commercial jobs, a coating either performs or it shows. At the KRESA Career Connect Campus, it had to do both, on every surface, in full view, because the building was designed with almost nothing hidden.
The Painting Contractors Association has named H&H Painting Co. the winner of its Best Interior Commercial Project of 2026 Award for work at the KRESA Career Connect Campus in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The project called for extensive advance planning, several specialized coating systems, detailed surface preparation across a range of substrates, and continuous coordination with the other trades working the same spaces. Here is what that involved.
What the Award Recognizes
The PCA award is judged on the project, not the pitch. That is the part worth sitting with. It is not recognition for how a job was sold or described. It is recognition for how it was planned, prepped, sequenced, and finished, on a live construction site, alongside contractors with their own schedules.
For our team, that is the only kind of recognition that means much. The measure of a commercial coatings contractor is how the building looks in year ten and whether the schedule held while it was being built. This project tested both.
You can see the announcement on our Facebook page.
A Campus Built for Hands-on Learning
The KRESA Career Connect Campus is a career and technical education facility in Kalamazoo County, built to help students learn trades and technical skills in an environment that mirrors the workplaces where they will eventually work.
That intent directly shaped the coatings’ scope. Rather than concealing the building’s systems behind finished ceilings, the design leaves structural steel, ductwork, gas piping, and MEP components exposed as part of the teaching environment. Everything we coated is within reach for a student to walk up to and examine.
The Scope of Work
H&H self-performed the full interior coatings package:
Each system on that list has its own prep standard, application window, and inspection criteria. Intumescent fireproofing must achieve a specified dry film thickness to maintain its fire rating, and it must do so while still reading as an architectural finish. Thermal coatings on envelope penetrations serve a building-science function before an aesthetic one. Graphic wallcoverings have no tolerance for a wall that was not prepped flat.
Running all of it meant treating the scope as ten coordinated packages rather than one paint contract.
Protecting the Mass Timber
The largest technical challenge on the project was not a coating at all. It was more than 115,000 square feet of mass timber decking that had to come through construction with its natural appearance intact.
Mass timber is both the structure and the finish in the same material. It cannot be sanded back and recoated the way drywall can. So the protection and masking of that decking was planned as its own scope item, with its own sequencing, staged so that the masking went up and came down in step with the overhead spray work rather than sitting exposed to traffic for months.
That sequencing is what made the open-ceiling design work. Clean, consistent finishes on the steel and the MEP components above, and wood below that still looks like wood.
Safety and Coordination
H&H worked this project as a participant in the MIOSHA Partnership Program:
On a job with lift work, spray application, and floor preparation happening near other trades, coordination and safety are the same activity. A sequencing conversation that does not happen becomes an incident that does.
The Finished Result
The completed campus does what it was designed to do. The exposed structural steel, ductwork, and piping read as intentional architecture and also serve as instruction. A student in a construction trades program can look up and see how the building was assembled, what protects the steel, and why the systems run where they do.
That is the version of a coatings package worthy of an award. It holds up as a finish, it performs as fire protection and thermal control, and it teaches.
The KRESA Career Connect Campus was also featured as an honorable mention in the APC Top Job 2026 publication.
Planning a complex commercial painting or coatings project in West Michigan? Contact H&H Painting Co. to discuss your facility, specifications, schedule, and performance requirements. Call 269-748-0933.
