Hardwood Floors June/July 2025

Wood Stock

By Libby White Johnston EXTRAORDINARY VISION

Wood flooring professionals always should want to bring their clients’ visions to life, but what if a client’s vision involves seeing potentially hundreds of millions more colors than the average person? That was the case with a recent project for the LED Coating Solutions by Archetypal team in New York, New York. Avedis Duvenjian and Vartan Arutyunian specialize in custom color matching, but this project presented a unique challenge.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LED COATING SOLUTIONS BY ARCHETYPAL

The client knew all of the products that had been used previously on the floors, so Duvenjian asked what she did and did not like about them. Next, he prepared panels and brought Arutyunian with him to the loft. The floors already had been sanded back to raw wood by the prior contractors, so Duvenjian waterpopped them and made some brown samples on the floors as well. While the homeowner liked the dark brown color, she had a strong dislike of green undertones and was seeing it in the brown samples.

When approached with the project, Duvenjian learned that the clients’ floors already had been resanded seven or eight times during the last two years in an effort to get the color just right. While the homeowners knew exactly what they wanted, no one had been able to create the dark espresso brown color they envisioned for the century-old maple wood floors. The floors were in a loft that used to be a clothing factory in the fashion district. “She told me they bought this place because of the floors,” shares Duvenjian. “There had been sewing machines when it was a garment factory, so I figured right away the problem was they had been oiling those machines for 100 years. All the oil soaks into the maple floors, then the wood is not going to take color.”

“Usually people are trichromatic, meaning they have three cones next to their retina and they see one million colors. Tetrachromatic is when you have four cones and you are able to see 100 million colors. In the brown samples, she was able to see the green separate undertone and the red separate undertone, so unless I was able to make a dramatic difference, she was still going to see that.” — Avedis Duvenjian, LED Coating Solutions by Archetypal

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