High-Impact Floors

Trailblazing Floors

Custom rugs can soften any hardwood floor and accent the room. For example, C.O.M. Custom LLC, a custom-rug designer in Minneapolis, has merged the latest computer-design technology with old-world craftsmanship from India. C.O.M. designers generate life-sized “maps” of their clients’ rug designs and deliver them to their manufacturers in India, who then apply their traditional rug-making methods.

“I used to have to hand paint and hand render all my designs. It was so much more labor intensive than the way we’ve been doing it the last five years or so,” says Blair Bender, artistic director at C.O.M. By shaving significant design time off the front of the production process, he adds, wait times for custom rugs have been shortened from up to 12 months down to as little as eight weeks. “All these things I can do on a computer in hours used to take days and weeks.”

C.O.M. specifies only New Zealand wool. “It’s the best wool in the world to use for rugs,” Bender says. Rugs can be either hand-knotted or hand-tufted, in which heavy canvas mesh is stretched over a frame and a tufting gun, similar to a hand-held sewing machine, is used to punch yarns through the canvas. Hand-knotted rugs can have knot counts ranging from 36 knots per inch to 169 knots per inch. “The higher the intricacy of design, the higher the knot count has to be,” Bender says. Hand-tufted rugs are less expensive, he adds. They can last more than 20 years, but they generally can only approximate the more intricate designs.

Many more unique flooring options abound. Cork has become a popular type. “It’s a beautiful, really unique application,” she says. “You can get all sorts of different looks,” Goodwin says. For more specialized applications, leather and glass show potential. Leather has some limits, but is still used in some homes. “It’s expensive and it’s a pretty specific look—it’s very traditional, which probably limits its marketability,” Flesher says. Several years ago, Flesher designed a client’s smoking room with a leather floor, in which the leather tiles were installed in a herringbone pattern. “It’s a pretty durable floor,” he says. “And the great thing about leather is that it gets better with age.” Glass provides a clean, contemporary look. “I like that application for times where you want to generate a lot of interest in the floor,” says Goodwin. “If you light the glass floor from underneath, it has a really nice glow.”