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 UNFINISHED CRAFTSMANSHIP Endurance Floor Co. Inc.MIAMI, FLA. The Great |
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The first day Leonard Hall worked on this floor, he said a prayer. "I said, 'Please don't let me mess up now,"' he recalls. "It's one of those jobs where you can't undo anything because everything's so interwoven and interlocked." His prayers were answered. Not only is the floor flawless, it impressed the ASID judges enough to garner this year's award for Unfinished Craftsmanship and Design. The floor features 140 feet of vines and flowers inlaid into a field of 3¼ inch, first-grade maple that covers the home's foyer, gallery, living room and dining room. The idea grew from the home's designer, Dalia Berlin, who had seen laser inlays with similar natural motifs but didn't like the repetition. Hall came up with a sample template for a custom design, and Berlin gave him the job, carte blanche. "I told my partner, Martha Smith, 'This is going to take awhile; you're going to have to cover for me," he says. He was right: Hall delved into research on botany drawings, the beginning of a project that would end up taking 318 hours to complete. Once the maple was installed, it was rough sanded at the perimeter, allowing Hall to sketch the vines on flat, clean wood. Drawing the freehand sketch of the vines and flowers took 5½ days, while at the shop, the raw poplar lumber for the vines was being resawn and planed into ¼-inch-thick blanks. With the floor sketch complete, it was traced with tracing paper and copied onto the poplar with carbon paper. |
Once those were cut, the floor pattern was retraced using the cut poplar pieces and the maple was routed out. To create the curving flower stems, Hall used a 1/8-inch bit on the router to cut out a path 1/8-inch to 1/4-inch wide. He then used 3/8-inch poplar blanks that had been soaked in water overnight, taking on a consistency similar to cooked spaghetti, and shaved them with a small hand plane and utility knife to fit in the slot's variable width. Yellow wood glue holds the stems in place. Hall included 142 flowers and buds in the piece, no two of which are exactly alike. Bubinga, cocobolo, Indian rosewood, lacewood, American cherry, mahogany, Brazilian cherry, padauk and bird's-eye maple were all used for the flowers. Careful attention was paid to positioning the flowers in realistic positions relative to the sunlight in the house. In front of sliding glass doors, it appears that the wind has blown the flowers, leaving several petals and leaves scattered on the floor. Hiding inconspicuously in other areas of the floor are three ladybugs of padauk and wenge and two butterflies of ash and purpleheart. Such attention to detail resulted in a floor that both Hall and the owner consider to be more a work of art than a floor. In fact, the owner requested that Hall sign the floor with his signature, which he did on top of a vine using a very fine router bit. It was a fitting end for Hall's first freehand inlay project and more than three months of painstaking work - a project Hall says comes along only once in a lifetime. |
