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"Art floors"—that's the phrase Design Wood Floors owner John DiPonzio uses to describe a special set of floors he's installed over three decades in the industry, and for good reason. These floors incorporate resins, mosaics, geometric cuts, organic shapes and aniline dyes to create a floor befitting an expressionist painter. In creative genius fashion, DiPonzio started this particular floor as a sketch on a napkin. DiPonzio calls it Bramble Sky. "If you were laying beneath a bramble looking up at the sky, you'd have these branches and woody shapes," he says. "I wanted that earthy representation of how twigs bend in and around each other." He installed the floor in what he refers to as the "floor gallery" at his home in Blackstone, Mass. He first cut a number of organic shapes from a 10-by-10-foot dry-racked field of mahogany. These were strung together with the grain going in random directions to form the "web" of mahogany in the final floor. He filled a portion of the negative space between the web with white oak. In the other voids went a thin layer of luan plywood upon which he and his life and business partner Suzanne Lockwood glued hundreds of tiny end-grain blocks in various formations. DiPonzio placed floor shavings and twigs from outside his home between the end grain blocks. Then he poured a layer of polyester resin thin enough to adhere the wood pieces to the plywood and let it dry before pouring in the rest of the resin (adding all the resin at once would cause the wood pieces to go buoyant, he explains). The floor was then sanded with an edger and palm sander. In order to stain the white oak with a blue aniline dye, DiPonzio first brushed sealer onto the mahogany so it would repel any errant stain. Finally, he coated the floor with a water-based finish, which he says does not discolor the resin. It took him around 120 hours to complete, but the effort was worth it for DiPonzio, who considers his art floors as a new, expressionist approach to flooring: "It's art first, floor second."
DiPonzio and his partner positioned end-grain blocks, wood shavings and twigs before pouring the first layer of resin.
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