AWI Premium, Custom, or Economy: What Grade You Are Really Specifying

The three AWI grades are the mechanism by which a millwork specification controls quality. A specification that names no grade has selected none of them.

Economy, Custom, and Premium are the three grades of work defined by the Architectural Woodwork Standards. They are the mechanism through which a millwork specification actually controls quality.

They are also the most commonly omitted line in a millwork section, which means a great deal of work is built to whichever grade the fabricator normally produces.

What Actually Changes Between Grades

The grades are not vague quality tiers. Each carries specific, measurable requirements across the same subjects.

Allowable material characteristics tighten as the grade rises: which natural characteristics are permitted in lumber and veneer, in what size and frequency. Premium restricts these substantially relative to Custom.

Fabrication tolerances tighten. Permitted gaps at joints, flushness between adjacent faces, alignment across a run — all are given numerically, and all are smaller at Premium.

Construction requirements change. Joinery methods, panel and edge treatment, and hardware requirements differ by grade.

Finish requirements change, in system, in surface preparation, and in permitted defects per unit area.

Installation tolerances tighten. How plumb, how level, how flush, and what gap is acceptable at each interface.

Choosing Realistically

Economy is appropriate for utility and back-of-house work where the surface is functional and not on display. It is a legitimate grade, not a substandard one.

Custom is the default for most quality commercial and residential work, and it is what most reputable shops build by habit. For the majority of a typical project it is the right answer.

Premium is appropriate where the work is a primary architectural surface examined at close range: feature elevations, sequenced veneer walls, board rooms, principal residential spaces. It costs meaningfully more, and the cost is in labor and material yield rather than in markup.

Specifying Premium across an entire project is usually a mistake. It spends budget on closet interiors and back-of-house storage where no one will perceive the difference, and that money is not then available for the elevations that carry the design.

Mixing Grades Is Good Practice

A specification can and generally should name grades by scope. Premium for the identified feature elevations, Custom for general casework, Economy for back-of-house.

Doing this requires being precise about which scope is which — by room, by drawing reference, or by assembly type. Ambiguity here produces bids that are not comparable, because bidders will resolve it differently and the low number will be the one that resolved it downward.

A short schedule mapping grade to scope, cross-referenced to the drawings, is the cleanest way to express it.

Naming the Edition, and Precedence

Two supporting lines make the grade reference hold.

The standards are revised, and the requirements change between editions. Name the edition being referenced so that what is required is fixed rather than floating.

And state what governs when the drawings and the standard conflict. They will conflict — a detail drawn one way and a standard requiring another is routine. Settling that in the specification costs a sentence; settling it in the field costs a change order and a relationship.

What the Grade Does Not Do

A grade governs execution quality. It does not govern design.

Premium grade does not mean the elevation is book matched, that the grain runs vertically, or that the reveal is a quarter inch. Those are design decisions and they belong in the drawings.

The grade is a floor for how well the work is executed, and a well-chosen floor is worth a great deal. It is not a substitute for having drawn what you want.

VCS fabricates to drawings. Bring the elevation package.

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