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Being the new kid on the block is never easy, especially when you’re a century-old company with a reputation spanning generations of family ownership in your hometown. When National Lumber, a mainstay lumber and building materials (LBM) dealer in the Baltimore market since 1919, decided to expand into the D.C. metro area, opening a new design center in Chevy Chase provided the perfect go-to-market introduction.

The Chevy Chase Design Center opened in May 2020 and, despite debuting in the throes of the pandemic, it has successfully positioned National Lumber to bring its services to the wider region.

“A showroom is a great way to open up your arms and say come visit, and the Chevy Chase showroom announced to folks in a polished way that we existed,” says Neal Fruman, vice president of National Lumber and part of the family who founded the business. He and his brother are following in their father’s footsteps, as did their father, grandfather and great-grandfather — across five generations of Fruman’s.

“A showroom is a fantastic way to enter a market in a very inexpensive fashion, where you just have a sales team and displays and you can test out the market,” he says.


At around 1,500 square feet, the Chevy Chase showroom is smaller than the design center at National Lumber’s legacy location in Baltimore, where roughly 3,500 square feet are dedicated to cabinetry, windows, doors and displays of various products. The “proudly independent,” family-owned business employs 70 people, most working out of the Baltimore distribution and design center. The Chevy Chase Design Center is supported by two full-time sales representatives and a kitchen designer.