Can Wood Floor Pros and Designers Get Along?

Designers have a bad reputation in the wood flooring industry, and there's no denying that the two groups have an overall compatibility issue. On the one hand you're talking about a guy or gal who's used to dealing with practical things like square footage, species hardness and density, floor thickness, and issues with coordinating the job site. He (or she) is looking at the project in a very systematic breakdown kind of manner. The designer, however, is looking at it from the sense of feeling and the perspective the owners will have when they walk in the room. Will it make the owners feel comfortable and welcome? Does that wood go with the color palette? Does the grain of the wood fight with the furniture selection? Well, how is the wood floor guy supposed to know about color palettes and how wood grain "fights" with things? The designer is dealing with the emotional side of things, but the flooring installer is not an emotional side kind of person, and that's where things go wrong on projects.

In a market like mine here in Southern Florida, though, if you want to build a high-end wood flooring business, you need to work with the design community. I've built my business over the last 28 years on high-end builders and designers, and here are some things I've learned along the way.

Listen to how they talk. The design community is all about aura, look, feel and style. Go to the bookstore and pick up regional or national design magazines. Read and study the words the designers use to describe their projects. Go to design events and listen to the designers talk. Go to local ASID events. I've taught ASID seminars, and I've also been a guest lecturer at design schools when they are learning about materials. The more time you spend around designers, the more comfortable you'll feel speaking their language. If you can pick up on key words and ideas, and (just like any basic sales training) mimic the way the designers describe things, that will help you build better business relationships.

Start to translate. Once you begin getting used to the designer language, you can start to understand what they want. You might be looking at a natural white oak plank and the designer says, "It appears too classical; we want something more modern." To a regular floor guy, we don't know what the heck that means. But to the designer, "modern" probably means something clean, very simple, very basic, like a clear maple. Another example is, "The floor is too busy." That could mean there is too much variety in the boards, too much grain or there are too many short pieces. You need to listen carefully and figure it out.

Educate yourself on design. You'll have a designer tell you she wants a floor to "complement the room." You have to really spend some time looking at design books and magazines and creating mental images of what you see so you can understand styles from Art Deco to Modern to Victorian to eclectic. When I was starting, I wasn't even sure was "eclectic" meant. I had to figure it out, and I did that by infusing myself into the design community and asking them straight up: What does that mean?

Be an authority. You need to help shepherd the designers while they work with the owner but not let them get things so far out of whack that you can't create what they want in a wood floor. They'll imagine the craziest thing you can do to a wood floor, and it might not be impossible, but it's monetarily impractical. You might create a seven-board sample and they'll tell the client the whole floor will look like one certain board. You have to step up and tell them, "Mother Nature made this; we can't make every board look like that one board." You have to have some authority without being too abrasive to them, because the design community is very sensitive, and it's a sensitivity we lack.

Treat it like a date. Every time you're dealing with a new designer, it's just like a first date. You've got to put your best foot forward and see how you get along. Sometimes you may find out you don't mesh, and that's OK; you can't be everything to everybody. If your relationship is very fractured, it's probably best you part early on before the project gets out of whack and turns into a catfight.

Be patient. Some designers will not have any fixed idea of how they want the project to look at the end, so they have no idea how to start at the beginning. You'll get a call and they say they want "a wood floor dark in color, but not with a lot of grain, and we want it to look kind of Polynesian." You'll take the samples you think are right and when they put it with the textiles and color palettes and furniture, they'll say the floor is all wrong.

Discussions then lead to another floor material that you will sample for them soon. Occasionally, when you go back two weeks later they have changed direction and are working with all new materials and furniture. Don't get discouraged, just be patient. However, if there seems no end to their indecision, this can go on to the point where the job is too much of a loss of money and time, and it demoralizes your staff. In these cases we decide to gracefully get out of the project altogether.

Find designers who make your life easy. They do exist. Typically, larger design houses are pretty good clients because they have a dedicated staff who handle the different tasks like designing, purchasing, project expediting, and project managing. At small one- or two-person firms, where the designers have to wear every hat, that can get stressful for them. They work on (have I mentioned it?) a lot of emotion, so if you get somebody who can't handle the stress, they'll wig out on you. On the other hand, a great, knowledgeable designer can make your life easy. I have a client I've been working with for 12 years. He'll call and say, "I need an American walnut floor in a natural color in a satin finish." I give him samples, he works with the homeowner to get approvals, and we're good to go. It can't get any easier for me, and those are the designers I love.