The uber-creative wood floor craftsmen who push the limits enough to win Wood Floor of the Year can be, at times, consumed by their passion. That can mean long nights of experimentation and tricky installations, failures, do-overs, a few choice words … and a supportive spouse accustomed to enduring nights alone while the tortured wood floor artist plies his craft. Joe and Joni Rocco of Artistic Floors by Design in Parker, Colo., are no exception, so when Joe threw out a crazy idea for their basement floor, the reaction from Joni was one of, perhaps, good-natured weariness. "Joni looked at me like, 'You're such an idiot—that's just dumb,'" Joe recalls, laughing. "Her second look was like, 'Well, here we go.'"
The concept inspiring this reaction was something Joe had contemplated for awhile: Can a wood floor have an additional utilitarian function besides being just, well, a floor? For his own house, Joe suggested the wood floor curve up from the actual floor to support the bar surface, and that was the idea that inspired "the look" from his spouse.
"That first look was like the gauntlet being thrown down for me," Joe says, and he forged ahead with the execution. They had already purchased the 5-inch white oak plank for the floor; for the bar legs he bought 10-foot-long material from the lumberyard milled to 1⁄4 inch thick. After calculating the radius for each one, he soaked the pieces in Windex for a day and a half, then set them in a jig; each leg had about 56 clamps. Once all seven legs were glued, hardened and wire-brushed to match the floor, he regrooved them to lock into the floor. Where the existing floor met the curve of the legs, he cut the flooring at an angle for a seamless appearance.
The resulting effect is stunning, although Joe says some people pointed out that, while it looks cool, now they can't move the bar in the future. That's fine with him, he says—this was the last piece of a much bigger, extensive remodel. "I'm so done with the basement," he says with finality. Done with class, we might add.
See a video of Joe Rocco discussing his novel floor:
