The Tommy Car Wash Design
Modern and Magnificent
Take a look at the local car washes in your town sometime. In most of the nation, you’ll find a few self-serve wash stations, a large number of automatic in-bay washes, some fundraisers with kids and sponges, and a few tunnel washes that may or may not be showing their age.
Most of these options, while they may be successful, aren’t impressive. Self-serve wash stations are basically open garages, automatic in-bays built like shoeboxes, and the majority of express washes are fairly low slung with bricked up walls and either flat or pointed tops.
Part of our mission with the Totally Tommy Building Design was to create the best looking car wash design in history—a local destination that impresses everyone who sees it and blows other locations’ capture rates out of the water. We needed a wash that looked every bit as good as it performed.
People really, really care about their cars and too many car washes have a reputation for causing damage to tires, wheels, bumpers, and surfaces. As a friction cleaning express wash we were faced with the problem of designing a facility that overcame that distrust and hesitation with a message of welcome, sophistication, and modernity. We decided that we should SHOW the consumer what they’re getting, breaking the shoebox pattern with great vision and display.
Our Totally Tommy facility boasts vaulted glass windows, reaching out towards visitors and inviting them to look in from any side and see the wash system (brightly lit and fully stainless steel arches, red or blue mitter cloth, high quality curving signage) in action. It also includes a surprisingly durable clear acrylic roof that can be equipped with heat reflectors for warmer climates. This acrylic roof allows sunlight to pour through the wash, further illuminating the equipment (without using electricity), warming the facility during winter months, and allowing the wash bay to feel more expansive and open than just about any other wash bay in any other facility on the market.
But a glass tunnel by itself didn’t cut it, and as any operator knows a tremendous amount of car wash equipment, from pumps to storage containers to plumbing, isn’t exactly presentable. So we took a page out of architecture design from centuries past and came up with the dry backroom and paired towers you see below.
Our dry backroom compactly stores car wash pumps, detergents, and other car wash equipment while our secondary, shorter tower has storage space for advertising materials, site maintenance supplies, and reserve detergents. The main tower, over two stories in total height, houses the flight deck and teller, directs customer traffic to the pay lanes from a distance, has perfect faces for large scale branding and advertising, and even includes a both a manager’s office AND a second story owners suite.
This car wash setup and design frames and supports the building—like you would expect from corner towers on a castle or paired bookends on a shelf. Our site is visible at a much greater distance than your average wash design, looks unified, colorful, dramatic, and is so visually interesting (compared you’re your average boxy wash) that customers find themselves captivated, looking it over every time they go past and liking what they see.
Of course, the only way to really share the full impact of our car wash design is to have you see it for yourself. So schedule a trip today to our newest facility in Holland Michigan. This gas c-store car wash at Chicago Drive and Waverly (The WAVERLY SITE) has had truly record breaking success and we would love to demo it for you in person! Contact our sales team at sales@tommycarwash.com or call us at (616) 494-0411 today to make arrangements!.
Tommy Car Wash Systems