Surface Blog

Utah customers “Love, Love, Love” their Eastern White Pine floor

• Posted by
• Jane Eklund

Sometimes our customers know exactly what kind of floor they want. Sometimes they’ve seen something they like and hope to replicate it. Sometimes they want a certain look or feel, be it rustic or modern, classic or elegant. Sometimes they want a floor that’s historically accurate for their antique home.

What we want is for our customers to be happy. That means working with them to bring their vision for a new floor to reality. It’s no surprise that the Carlisle staff members who work most directly with customers (and with their designers, architects, and builders) are called “Sales and Design Consultants.” They’re skilled at walking you through all of the types of wood that we offer and matching those woods to the appropriate hand-made surface from our custom shop, as well as to the perfect Carlisle stain and/or finish. Our Sales and Design Consultants will even guide you or your installer through the installation and finishing process with written instruction and phone assistance.

Our website, with its hundreds of photographs of floors that have been installed around the US and beyond, is designed to help in the process, too.

To give you an example of how it works, we share the story of a homeowner from Park City, Utah. She wanted floors that resembled those in two of the photos on our website (you can view the photos here and here). We helped her select 850 square feet of our Premium Eastern White Pine in 5- to 9-inch face widths with a Hit or Miss surface, finished with Gingerbread stain and Carlisle Tung Oil.

The skilled craftspeople in our Custom Shop created exactly the surface look she wanted.

The customer is delighted with her new floor. She sent along this note recently:

“We Love, Love, Love our floor.  We adore it and could not be happier with the final product.  It is gorgeous!”

Click here to learn about the process of selecting a Carlisle floor that’s right for you, your style, your home, and your budget.

Posted on Jul 26, 2011 AT 12:13 AM in (2) Comments

White Pine floor dazzles in Portage, Wisc., live-work studio

• Posted by
• Jane Eklund

Wow! The architect’s description of this studio, designed for living and working, sounds spectacular enough, but the photos really floored us — if you’ll excuse the bad pun. Here’s how the architect-led design-build firm, Midwest Modern LLC, characterizes this new construction in Portage, Wisconsin, which makes dramatic use of Carlisle Eastern White Pine flooring:

“Rustic, modern LIVE/WORK Studio wholly built with Insulated Concrete Forms. Passive solar design and high performance shell fused with in-floor radiant coupled to geo-thermal. Boldly sited atop a ravine escarpment and capitalizing on breathtaking views over the Wisconsin River valley, this study in opposites is an instant family heirloom.”

Carlisle Sales and Design Consultant Gary Ryer of our Stoddard, N.H., headquarters notes that the floor, in 6-inch face widths, was glued directly on concrete. In the great room, the planks run up to the floor-to-ceiling windows and are aligned with the decking outside for a continuous look. The homeowner finished the floor herself with Carlisle’s Oatmeal Stout stain and Tung Oil.

It all adds up to, as Gary Ryer notes, “another great example of what many consider a rustic floor in a very contemporary/minimalist setting.”

Enjoy these photos, and if you’d like to see more, click here for a link to an album on Midwest Modern’s website.

Posted on Jul 22, 2011 AT 09:54 PM in Green Building • Home Building & Contracting • (2) Comments

Red Oak makes a striking floor in San Francisco Bay area home

• Posted by
• Jane Eklund

Thinking about a Red Oak floor? It’s a choice that many people seeking a rich, high-quality look shy away from, because inexpensive red oak strip flooring, which typically has unattractive grain patterns, is overabundant.

That’s really too bad, because when red oak is grown the way Carlisle oak is grown – in cooler climates where it’s allowed to mature slowly – it produces a really striking floor that works equally well in rustic and contemporary settings.

So we were delighted recently to get a note from Craig Norleen, project consultant and manager at Crocker Homes Inc. in the San Francisco Bay area. He’s heading up construction of a residence that includes an Heirloom Red Oak floor, in 8-inch face widths.

The homeowners “love the Carlisle wide plank floor,” he wrote.

Craig, who worked with Sales and Design Consultant Sarah Bergren of our Denver showroom, was pleased with the quality and service he got from Carlisle, too. “Carlisle is a valued Crocker Homes partner,” he wrote. “Carlisle was there at each step in the process helping our architect, owner and installers. Their expertise, ability to listen and ask questions helped our team realize the vision we were trying to create.”

Take a look at these photos, and we think you’ll agree the Red Oak floors are a vision, indeed!

Posted on Jul 19, 2011 AT 10:09 PM in Hardwood Flooring • (3) Comments

Interior design blog highlights Carlisle Oak and Walnut

• Posted by
• Jane Eklund

Catherine Cleare of Catherine Cleare Originals, an interior design firm in Westport, Connecticut, featured Carlisle floors in a June 20, 2011 entry in her blog. Titled “How an Interior Designer Goes With and Against the Grain,” the post identifies a few current trends in wood flooring.

One hot trend she mentions is finishing an oak floor with a gray stain. She includes a photo of a Carlisle White Oak floor, rift-and-quarter sawn, with Carlisle’s custom Whitewashed Fence stain. Oak “has a natural oil finishing system which makes it great for any space,” she writes. Click here to learn more about Carlisle White Oak floors.

Catherine Cleare also mentions Carlisle’s Walnut flooring with Watermill texture.  The floor “embodies a very natural distressing but also a timeless aged appearance,” she writes. “Traditional and timeless is always trendy.” Click here for information on and photos of Carlisle Walnut flooring.

Click here to read Catherine Cleare’s blog post and see the photos.

Posted on Jul 17, 2011 AT 10:21 PM in Hardwood Flooring • (3) Comments

Do It Yourselfers install Walnut over concrete in Houston area

• Posted by
• Jane Eklund

Carlisle floors can be successfully installed over concrete; better yet, if you’re handy you can do it yourself! Check out these photos sent by Houston-area customers who just completed their second go-round with laying Carlisle Walnut themselves. They installed the flooring direct to a concrete slab. Thanks to Kevin Crowder of Carlisle’s Denver showroom, who worked with the customers, for forwarding these photos to us. They give a good overview of the project, before and after.

Click here to read more about Carlisle floors installed over concrete.

Click here to learn about Do-It-Yourself floor installation.

Posted on Jul 15, 2011 AT 12:44 AM in Hardwood Flooring • (3) Comments