Reproducing the Historic Floor at RISD's Woods-Gerry House

Most floors are meant to be walked on and not much else. Every so often, you come across one that was built as carefully as the furniture in the room, and the floor at the Woods-Gerry House is one of those. Heritage Restoration was hired to document and reproduce it, and it turned out to be one of the more satisfying puzzles we have taken on.

A House Worth Fighting For

The Woods-Gerry House is the gallery and admissions building for the Rhode Island School of Design, and it sits at the crest of College Hill in Providence. The architect Richard Upjohn designed it for Anne Brown Francis and Marshall Woods in the mid-1800s. The 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture calls it "a severely restrained composition" in the Italian Renaissance style that was popular at the time, and it was the first house in the neighborhood built to take advantage of the hilltop, with its main rooms lined up along the west side for the views across the terrace. heritagerestoration

The house has had a few lives since then. In 1931, it became the home of U.S. Senator Peter Goelet Gerry, and RISD bought it shortly after he died. At one point, the school planned to tear it down, which set off one of the most heated preservation fights this city has ever seen. Preservation won. The building is still standing, serving as RISD's administrative headquarters with student galleries on the first floor, which is a good reminder that the old buildings we still have are often the ones somebody fought to keep.

A Floor Built Like Furniture

The floor matches the quality of the house. It is a geometric pattern built from alternating sections of walnut and white oak, with a few mahogany highlights, in widths that run from about an inch and a half up to three inches. Most of the oak is rift-sawn, which means it was cut so the grain runs straight and tight down the length of each board, the most stable and most expensive way to saw a log. There are a few quarter-sawn areas mixed in as well. Whoever laid this floor was not cutting corners.

Why We Reproduced It Instead of Refinishing

By the time we were called in, the original floor was worn past the point where refinishing would do anything. A floor can only be sanded so many times before there is nothing left to sand, and this one had reached the end of that road. So the job was not to save the existing wood. It was to reproduce the floor exactly, pattern for pattern, so that what replaced it would read as though it had always been there.

It Starts With Documentation

That starts with documentation, and this is the part most people never think about. Before a single new board is cut, you have to understand the floor completely. We documented the whole thing, working out the rhythms and the repeating patterns that give it its order, and recording how every piece relates to the ones around it. A floor like this has a logic to it, and if you do not capture that logic first, the reproduction will feel slightly off in a way people notice even if they cannot say why.

Building the Floor in the Shop

From there, we built full-scale versions of each section, which let us see exactly how every piece was cut and fit together before committing to the real material. Then each section was assembled into its own plywood box. That may sound like an odd step, but it is the heart of how a job like this gets done right. Fitting the pieces in the controlled environment of the shop, inside a box sized to the section, means the tight joinery and the pattern are perfect before anything goes to the site. The finished sections are then transported and installed as units, so the floor goes back together cleanly instead of being puzzled out board by board on site.

Matching More Than a Hundred Years of Age

One last detail that matters more than it sounds. The floor was finished clear when it was first laid, and over the years, the wood has turned a warm amber. New oak and walnut do not look like that. They look new. So part of the work is reproducing the color the floor has earned over more than a century, not the raw color of fresh lumber, so the reproduction settles into the room instead of announcing itself.

That is really the whole goal with work like this. When it is done, you should not be able to tell it was done at all.