Portland, a court-ordered break-up and two founding dates.

LP Building Solutions is the name under which Louisiana-Pacific Corporation sells its building products, and the company trades on the New York Stock Exchange as LPX. Its headquarters are in Nashville, Tennessee. The full corporate name still appears in its own releases, which describe “Louisiana-Pacific Corporation (LP Building Solutions, NYSE: LPX)”, so the short form LP sits between a legal name and a trading name.

The company and English Wikipedia give different founding dates. In a release issued in Nashville on 20 July 2022, marking its fiftieth anniversary, LP says it was “first incorporated on July 20, 1972” and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange the following January. English Wikipedia gives the incorporation date as 5 January 1973. Both sources agree on the general period, and the company itself uses 1972 in the closing paragraph of its releases.

English Wikipedia also records how the business began: as part of a court-ordered break-up of Georgia-Pacific. It says that William H. Hunt, a vice-chairman at Georgia-Pacific, was chosen as Louisiana-Pacific’s first chairman, and that Harry A. Merlo, who had been chief executive since the founding, succeeded Hunt as chairman in 1974 while remaining chief executive. For its early decades the company was based in Portland, Oregon.

The same source describes rapid growth through the 1970s. It lists purchases of lumber companies in several western and southern states, the acquisition of the Fibreboard Corporation in 1976, and fifteen building-material centres in southern California bought from Lone Star Industries in 1979. In the same period, it says, the company owned the Portland Timbers football club, from 1979 to 1982, in the North American Soccer League.

From strand board to siding to a Nashville head office.

The product that shaped the company was made from wood strands rather than solid timber. In its 2022 release LP dates its “pioneering roots” to 1979, when it opened an oriented strand board, or OSB, mill in Hayward, Wisconsin, and it quotes its chief executive of the time telling investors, “I’ve never seen a forest product accepted so quickly by the marketplace.” English Wikipedia says the board was first introduced under the trade name Waferwood, that the company opened its first Inner-Seal mill in 1980, and that it advertised the product as “the smart man’s plywood”. It adds that LP began to market Inner-Seal siding for the outside of houses in 1985.

English Wikipedia records that in the 1990s LP was the defendant in class actions brought by homeowners over Inner-Seal siding, and that the company reached a settlement in 1996.

The siding that followed carries the brand today. LP says that in 1997 it launched LP SmartSide Trim & Siding, after developing a process that, in the company’s words, treats each strand of wood with “a proprietary combination of zinc borate, resins, and waxes to help resist moisture”. The 2022 release then names a second family, LP Structural Solutions, which it traces to 1998 and the introduction of radiant barrier sheathing sold as LP TechShield; it lists later names in that family such as LP WeatherLogic Air & Water Barrier, LP Legacy Premium Sub-Flooring, LP FlameBlock Fire-Rated Sheathing and LP NovaCore Thermal Insulated Sheathing.

The move east came in the 2000s. English Wikipedia says the headquarters moved from Portland to Nashville in 2004, and that from 2006 to 2015 the company held the naming rights to the city’s football stadium, known in those years as LP Field. The 2022 anniversary release was issued from Nashville and names Brad Southern as chair and chief executive; it says the company runs plants in the United States, Canada, Chile and Brazil.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the outside of a house: the shingles and membranes on its roof, the boards and panels on its walls and the decking and railings around it. Roofing, siding and decking names sit at many different points in the building trade, from businesses that grew out of a single product or family firm to names that now belong to much larger groups selling a whole range of exterior materials.

Most homeowners meet these brands only a few times, and often through someone else: a contractor, a dealer, a sample board or a colour card. A brand’s identity is therefore carried less by a single product than by its name, its product families, its colour ranges and the programmes it runs for the people who install its materials. Ownership can change several times while the name on the bundle stays the same.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its names and product lines have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two letters doing the work of a long name.

The first design lesson in LP Building Solutions is in its name. A company called Louisiana-Pacific, based for decades in Oregon and now in Tennessee, presents itself under two letters and a descriptive phrase. The legal name has not changed, and the company’s own releases still give it in full, but the public name reduces it to LP and adds Building Solutions to say what the business does. The original name holds two place names, Louisiana and the Pacific; the company’s home today is Nashville.

The same two letters run through the product names. The 2022 release lists LP SmartSide, LP SmartSide ExpertFinish, LP BuilderSeries Lap Siding and LP Outdoor Building Solutions on the siding side, and LP TechShield, LP WeatherLogic, LP Legacy, LP FlameBlock and LP NovaCore on the structural side, along with LP TopNotch Sub-Flooring. In this list each product is introduced as LP plus a further name, so the company initials work as a prefix across the range.

The product names have changed over time. English Wikipedia says the early board was marketed as Waferwood and then as Inner-Seal, and advertised as “the smart man’s plywood”. The siding that followed in 1997 was named SmartSide, a name that, like the old advertising line, uses the word smart.

The company’s current slogan is short. Its website and releases use “Building a Better World”, marked as a trademark, and the closing paragraph of the 2022 release links it to the founding: “Since its founding in 1972, LP has been Building a Better World.” Its website also lists separate pages for homeowners and professionals, a colour and inspiration section, a home visualiser and contractor training and loyalty programmes — sections addressed to the people who choose and fit siding as well as to homeowners.

For a design guide, LP Building Solutions shows how a long, place-bound corporate name can be cut down to initials and a plain description, then reused as a prefix across a whole product range. Compare it with James Hardie, whose fibre cement siding competes for the same walls, and CertainTeed, another siding and roofing name. For this guide we use forest green, strand gold and bark brown with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep LP Building Solutions’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.