The line between craft and kitsch is mighty fine. Never has this felt more difficult to navigate than with our wood floors for Eden Hill. The wood we have to work with is old — salvaged from the original farmhouse on the property and a 1930 barn we took down in 2024. It isn’t wide plank, but it shares its heritage openly. You can’t look at it and not know that it is the kind of wood floor that is nearly impossible to buy new anymore without blowing the bank.
It also has meaning. We never intended to build a house. That wasn’t the dream for our property, but it became, slowly, the reality. And if building new was the only way forward towards a home, we wanted to make choices that rooted the house in the landscape, this very particular place, from the get-go. Using floors that had been walked on by generations of the family that owned the land since at least the 1860s was important to us. Peter, the final farmer on this land, had walked these floors all of his life. Now, they would find a new home with new feet pitter-pattering across them.
But the floors could not just be pulled up and reinstalled, and for a few reasons. First, we had two large sources of flooring, the house and the barn, with distinctly different floors. Perhaps strangely, the barn floor was objectively nicer. The planks had never been painted, are wider, and have longer ‘clear’ stretches, or areas with no eyes, damage, or other significant imperfections. The two floors were also different colors, as they were different types of wood. We didn’t have them tested, but the barn floor is maybe hemlock or something similar, whereas the house floor is a lighter wood, maybe pine, or cypress brought up from Florida as millions of acres of forests were being cleared at the turn of the century. If we put the barn floor and the house floor right next to each other without thinking carefully about it, the result would be strange.
So, some rooms became ‘barn’ and some ‘house.’ The library would be barn wood, and our bedroom ‘house’. The central hall is ‘barn’, and the upstairs hallway is ‘house’. The parlor posed an issue. We wouldn’t have enough of either wood to do it fully, and we even ordered wall-to-wall carpet samples to see if that might be a route to go down. Spoiler: the wool samples were cool, but we nixed the idea when Ben had a bright idea.
Using what was left of the wood from each source, Ben created a decorative pattern that would give the differences a purpose. Inspired by intricate marquetry flooring, the design would evoke tradition but in a way that is uniquely our own and only possible here at Eden Hill.
And this is where the line between craft and kitsch comes up. There were so many times during this process of puzzling out flooring when there was a simple answer that would be easy to go with. And every time that little feeling of ick told us that making that decision would push us into the realm kitsch and the world of declarative kitchen signs. What we are after is craftsmanship, not the performance of the idea of craft for an audience. If there is going to be a fish on our wall (there won’t, for the record), we want it to be real — craft — not a singing ‘Loud Mouth Bass.’
Once the floors were in, we had to decide if and how we wanted to stain and seal them. This is where craft as a gut feeling came in. The simple answer was to simply seal. Let the wood speak for itself, right? That’s craft. And it may be, but not for this project, our project. Without even exchanging words, we knew how we wanted our floors to feel, and we knew that meant that, in most of the house, they had to go dark. A custom stain blend to color match some 18th century oak paneling did the trick. Craft, not kitsch.
Soon after the floors were finished, they were covered for protection as plastering rolls into gear. We won’t see them again until soon before we move in. Tucked away, they continue to tell a story about this place, the people who created it, and the next family — our family — to call it home.
P.S. A few rooms are getting salvaged slate and tile made by us. More on that to come as it happens!