Hardwood Floors April/May 2025

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By Burt Bollinger Spaces SHAPING Melissa Tressler and Andrew Wilkinson of Looking Glass Floors in St. Louis recently worked on a hardwood flooring project that gave them the chance to do something unique. What started as a straightforward flooring installation turned into a creative blend of patterns and materials, thanks to the homeowners’ interest in exploring design possibilities and the team’s ideas. The project began with a plan to install they reached out to us for the flooring after seeing some of our previous work,” Wilkinson explains. “Initially, it was going to be mostly straight lay flooring, but they mentioned wanting something different for the dining room. That’s when the idea for a herringbone pattern came into play.” During a discussion about the dining room, the team noticed the potential in a nearby breakfast nook, which had an octagonal shape. “The homeowners hadn’t considered doing anything special in that space,” Tressler says. “But when we stood in the room and looked up, we saw the beams on the ceiling coming together in a central point, and that inspired us. Why not reflect that design on the floor?” The team developed a custom wagon-spoke pattern for the nook, taking the geometry of the beams and mirroring it on the floor. “We went through six or seven sketches before landing on the final red oak flooring in most of the home. “One of our guys had a friend who was hiring another company for renovations, and

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LOOKING GLASS FLOORS

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