The reference material arrived in a bag: rotted pieces of a wood floor installed over 130 years ago, species unknown. Edward Tsvilik and his team at Huntingdon Valley, Pa.-based Czar Floors pieced the rotted remnants together like a Lego set for a better idea of what the parquet floor in the salon (aka, drawing room) of Ventfort Hall, a Gilded Age mansion in Lenox, Mass., might’ve looked like, for they had been tasked with recreating it.
Built in 1893 for Sarah Morgan (the sister of financier J.P. Morgan), Ventfort Hall is a 28,000-square-foot brick and brownstone mansion, and one of roughly 70 “cottages” in Lenox and Stockbridge built by Gilded Age tycoons such as the Vanderbilts and Carnegies.
“The ground-floor salon was the only room in the house featuring a parquet floor, likely due to tight timelines to complete construction before welcoming its first guests in 1893,” Ventfort Hall Gilded Age Mansion and Museum Executive Director Wendy Healey says. “By the time we began the salon floor project in 2025, water infiltration had left the original wood severely damaged by rot and decay.”
When Tsvilik received the reference material, “It was literally a bag of rotten wood pieces,” he says. “It was challenging to get an idea of what species we needed to use.” Once the pieces were patched together, the Czar team sanded and finished them to match the reference photos as best they could. They came to the conclusion that the floor was white oak and walnut, but went through several batches before finding the wood that most closely matched the original. “It was more challenging than just replacing,” Tsvilik says. “We had to continue the same pattern and hope it matched.”
Czar Floors’ portion of the project ran roughly three months. The first month was spent entirely on verification before any production began. Tsvilik sent the mansion’s team dozens of drawings with exact measurements of each element so they could check them against the floor on site. Periodically, someone would turn up another old photograph, and the drawings would get adjusted again. Once the design was signed off, production took another seven weeks.
Tsvilik’s team supplied the floor unfinished so it could be sanded and finished on site—the same way it was done originally. The field was shipped pre-assembled and pre-sanded with face tape, and the borders were assembled in longer sections and face-taped the same way, so the installer, Martino Building LLC from Lenox, could glue down, do minimal sanding, and apply finish. In total, Czar produced several thousand square feet of historically accurate parquet in addition to the border work.
“We were absolutely blown away, and the guests to the house are very impressed,” Healey says. “The floor is absolutely beautiful, and, for the first time in many decades, looks the way it did when it was first installed.”
SUPPLIERS: Adhesive: Bostik | Finish: Basic Coatings | Saws: Festool
