Local husband and wife team up to open made-to-order Paint Place

Paint Place is a new business with one foot in the future and another in the past. Owner Anna Johnston believes that using the best aspects of both is a winning combination.

The store sells made-to-order paint from a storefront at 3100 E. Charleston Blvd. on the corner of Mojave Road. The company is owned by Johnston and operated by her, her husband Bryan and a small staff. The paint is made on the premises, with a specialized machine that includes six 600-gallon tanks of paint components.

"We are the only paint store in the valley to offer FreshChoice brand paint, which is dispensed with components made by MicroBlend Inc.," Bryan Johnston said. "We can make over 300 different kinds of paints with our machine. We can make up to 100 gallons per hour, and we make it fresh here in Las Vegas. At other places the paint can be months old."

In addition to the paint, the store offers a selection of painting tools, including brushes, rollers, paint trays and mixing equipment.

"Because we're this size, we can offer more personalized customer service," Anna Johnston said. "But we can still offer a quality product and make the paint to order very quickly."

Because the operation is small, Anna Johnston said the overhead is low enough that she can offer lower prices than many of her competitors for a product that is more environmentally friendly.

Part of the green aspects of the store, Bryan Johnston said, comes from the small size and the fact that the Johnstons don't have to warehouse a wide variety of paints.

"Other stores have to stock several varieties of base paints in different sizes," Bryan Johnston said. "In order to warehouse as many products as we can make, you'd need a space as big as one of the big-box hardware stores - the whole store, not just the paint department."

The Johnstons are longtime Las Vegas residents, and Bryan Johnston has been working with paint as a painting contractor since he graduated from Las Vegas High School in the early '90s.

"I've painted at least 1,000 houses in Las Vegas," he said.

Paint Place's MicroBlend's automated paint machine was previously owned by a paint contractor who sold paint to fellow contractors, including Bryan Johnston, who said he was the previous owner's biggest customer.

"He started his business in 2006 and then the housing crash came," Bryan Johnston said. "We bought the machine from him and moved over here to a smaller space with less overhead."

Anna Johnston's background is in accounting, and she believes that by providing individualized service and tapping her husband's professional lifetime of painting knowledge, she can convince contractors and homeowners to choose Paint Place over the one-stop shopping warehouse hardware stores and national chains.

For more information, visit paintplace.biz or call 834-6059.

Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 380-4532.