Curving a border has its challenges—particularly when you’re curving hundreds of lineal feet of it.
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Curving a border has its challenges—particularly when you’re curving hundreds of lineal feet of it.
“This corridor, it’s actually a full circle around the entire house,” says Edward Tsvilik of Huntingdon Valley, Pa.-based Czar Floors, which supplied the flooring for the 7,000-square-foot Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, N.Y., home.
The “rope” border—made up of maple, merbau and white oak—is a design Czar has offered for years. Curving such a large amount of it, however, put the company’s widely acclaimed precision skills to the test.
“We spent quite a bit of time making paper templates and numbering and labeling the templates for every section of this huge circle,” Tsvilik says.
Finding enough space for the enormous templates was a challenge in itself.
“Good thing it was the summertime; we had to place all those templates outside because we didn't have a place in the shop to roll out all this paper,” Tsvilik says. “We had to do it in the parking lot and basically take measurements off the templates.”
The company used lasers to ensure their flooring measurements were spot-on.
“There's a model of laser where you can basically put it on a tripod in the center and just kind of turn it around and it shoots lasers and measures multiple points,” Tsvilik says. “You can then export the autocad out of it, so it creates an autocad for you." It’s a tool Czar uses frequently in the large residences where its products tend to be found.
When the templates were ready, Czar manufactured the walnut plank and parquet that was used throughout the home. The stars in the field are made of maple and merbau. The company then used CNC machines to create the curving border.
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“Some sections of this curve seemed to have a bigger curve, so we had to make the pieces smaller, and others were more straight, so we were able to make them a little longer,” Tsvilik says. “We didn't want to create 10,000 different pieces for the installers, because they would go nuts putting it all together.”
Every piece of the solid wood used had to be labeled and marked for where it would fit in the intricate floor plan. The project ended up with thousands of pieces.
Czar’s crew installed the custom flooring themselves. “We wanted to make sure it is precise,” Tsvilik says. The floor was then sanded and coated with water-based finish.
While developing the curved borders required plenty of time and effort during the three-month project, Tsvilik says he never stopped thinking about the project as one entity.
"We tried to keep it all a continuous seam, so it's not roughly moving from one type of floor to another,” he says. “So we kind of tried to look at it not room-by-room, but the whole floor plan had to come together with a similar theme."
Suppliers:
Abrasives: 3M | Adhesive: Sika | Finish: Basic Coatings | Lasers: Leica | Sanding machine: Lägler North America | Wood flooring: Czar Floors
