Brothers in the Big Sky

By K. Schipper

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — After 83 years and three generations in the tile, terrazzo and stone business, Malisani Inc. is a fixture on the regional building scene – but certainly not a static one.

What started as Art Malisani Tile & Terrazzo always had a natural-stone component to it, with the Malisani family fine-turning the product mix through the decades. That included increasing their emphasis on countertops in the early 1990s, and adding monuments and memorials in the new century.

Click photo to enlargeThe reason behind all their moves is simple: survival. With a population of slightly fewer than 60,000 people in Great Falls, it’s important to find reasons to keep clients coming through the door, even though 600-mile round trips to install countertops aren’t unusual.

“You have to find ways to differentiate yourself from your competition,” says co-owner Tony Malisani.

QUIET EVOLUTION

In many ways, the Malisani story is a quintessential American tale.

The first Art Malisani emigrated from Italy in 1920 and went to work as a stone mason. By 1928, he had his U.S. citizenship and the confidence to buy an existing tile and terrazzo operation.

Working with his two brothers, Abele and Angelo, Art Malisani Tile & Terrazzo did well enough by 1935 that the company built its first warehouse in the 1100 block of Eighth Ave. North in Great Falls.(That building is still part of the operation today.)

Although the original name emphasized tile and terrazzo, Tony Malisani says that, from the beginning, the company also did a fair amount of dimensional stonework.

“The people who did terrazzo usually did marble and mosaic work because they had the equipment,” he says. “At the time, terrazzo was marble chips and cement, and the equipment used to grind and polish it was the same equipment used to grind and polish marble.”

And, he notes, the operative word at the time was marble, with much of the work being done in banks and hotels.Click photo to enlarge

In 1972, Art’s sons, Arthur John and Robert – along with their father – incorporated the company and changed the name to Malisani Inc. Robert left the company in 1977, and Arthur John purchased all the company stock.

In time, as the popularity of terrazzo faded, the Malisanis found themselves doing primarily tile work. Tony Malisani says both he and his older brother, Art Jr., spent a fair amount of time becoming tilesetters, although they also worked with the terrazzo crew and in the stone shop as they learned the business.

“We both have extensive experience with job management,” says Tony Malisani. “We both bring to the table a breadth of experience that’s probably unusual when you get into management. I think that experience is important; you need to have some empathy for your guys and you have to understand how things go in the field.”

He adds that occasionally a client will come in who still remembers one of the brothers from an installation done years ago and asks that they handle a new job personally. And, of course, if the need arises, they’ll still go help on a jobsite.

“It’s always a hoot for the crew when the old guys are out working on a job,” Tony Malisani says.

“A LITTLE DIFFERENT”

Art Jr. went to work full time at Malisani Inc. in 1980, and Tony joined the business in 1989 – just in time for what proved to be a redirection for the company.

Tony Malisani explains that in the late 1980s, the business – still mainly focused on tile work at the time – coped with a real downturn in the Montana economy.

“We decided we had to leverage what we could do into more products, just to flatten out the business curve,” he says. “We decided we were going to be more aggressive pitching terrazzo work, and we were going to get into granite countertops, which were just starting to appear in the market.”

Over time, the Malisanis recognized still another market they could easily service: monuments and memorials. That became a separate division of the company in 2001.