Historic US hotel restored with Malarkey’s circular shingles
Michigan’s historic Island House Hotel is an awarded Victorian building from the 19th century. To refurbish its roof in a durable and sustainable way, it chose Malarkey’s Legacy™ architectural shingles.
Re-roofing of heritage building with Malarkey’s Legacy® architectural shingles
Long-lasting, flexible and all-weather resilient shingles met durability and aesthetics requirements
New roof cleans the air equivalent to 22 trees and contains over forty thousand upcycled plastic bags
The challenge
The Island House Hotel is an awarded Victorian building from 1852, overlooking Lake Huron and set amongst lush gardens in Mackinac Island State Park.
The 19th century roof was in desperate need of refurbishment due to its age, the historic nature of construction, and the severe weather conditions of the island that impacted the roofing system over the years, resulting in leaks and rotting.
The hotel decided to undertake a challenging winter maintenance project, looking for a solution that would preserve the building’s beauty and functionalities, granting a timeless ambiance for decades to come.
The company providing the new roofing solution would also have to be able to deal with particular logistics challenges, such as transporting the materials by freighter boat and then horse to get to the job site, as this island does not allow cars. The timing was also essential, with constraints to finish the work right after the tourist season and before the ferry system shut down due to ice buildup in the straits of the Great Lakes.
The solution
Historic jobs require careful roofing procedures and attention to detail. In addition to preserving its look, the new roof needed to be able to withstand the severe winter weather conditions on the island.
That’s why the contractor decided to use the Malarkey Legacy™ shingles, made with the industry-leading NEX® Rubberized Asphalt. These are all-weather resilient shingles, with enhanced durability, hail impact resistance and granule adhesion, so shingles last longer. NEX® asphalt shingles were the natural answer for the roof as the flexibility of the product gave way to the substantial settling of the 165-year-old wood frame construction. No other roofing product would have been able to uniformly address the different rooflines, angles and pitches of this structure with the same degree of sustainability.
The sustainability of the roofing product was also a decisive factor for the customer. To make roofing more circular, an average Malarkey roof upcycles 3,200 plastic bags and five tires, while the smog-reducing granules act as the equivalent of two trees. In just a few years, Malarkey has diverted close to 4 billion plastic bags from landfill and “planted” the equivalent of more than 1.2 million trees.
THE RESULT
The maintenance project succeeded in preserving the historic aesthetic while providing the necessary strength and durability to protect this property. Despite the challenges associated with the logistical specificities of the island, the re-roofing project took only five weeks to complete.
Malarkey’s architectural shingle delivered a Class 4 hail impact rating and added durability to the roofline, enabling it to extend the life of the roof by decades. In addition, the Legacy™ shingles on the 3,250-square meter roof contained 66 tires and 44,000 plastic bags upcycled inside, and, thanks to their smog-reducing granules, they cleaned the air equivalent to planting 22 trees.
ARMA honored the re-roofing project with the 2022 Bronze Award in the Excellence in Asphalt Roofing Awards Program.
Malarkey shingles are the only asphalt shingle line we offer to customers because we believe in the value of the NEX® technology. We try to be as green of a company as possible, so the durability and upcycled content in these shingles are extremely important to us.
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