Last year, the interior designer of a splashy new condo building in Jupiter Beach, Fla., had dreamed up a genuine headache for the floor man. A seashell. In the elevator lobby, the designer wanted a seashell–not an uncommon motif for a building on the beach–but, in keeping with the highbrow character of the decor, this shell had to be a wood inlay with all the pale reds, pinks and whites of a real seashell that had been cast off in the shallows near shore.
Oh, and it ought to appear to have ripples running across it, as if it were lying just below the surface of the water.
That amounted to asking the floor man to create an inordinately complex jigsaw puzzle 7 feet long and 3 feet wide.
Sensing a stiff challenge, the floor man cut a deal. If he did the job right, he’d collect the fee. If not, both sides would walk away from the idea–the designer without a shell, the floor man with 4,500 custom-cut pieces of wood, few of them bigger than an adult’s thumb and all of them useless.
The gamble worked, the shell came together splendidly, and the check soon was in the mail.
It’s the sort of high-stakes job a newcomer to any field likes to take on, reasoning that if it goes well it will make a first-rate portfolio piece that can attract even more impressive commissions.
This floor man, however, was anything but a newcomer.
Birger Juell is one of the nation’s preeminent designers of custom wood floors, with 46 years experience of designing floors for everyone from Hugh Hefner to the Smithsonian Institution. He took the Jupiter Beach challenge, a $12,000 contract, because, he says, “I wanted to try a seashell. I had already done a spider web inlay in someone else’s floor, so why not try a seashell?”
The floor earned Juell the “Best Use of Wood Technology” honor in the National Wood Flooring Association’s 1995 Floor of the Year competition in April.
A canvas underfoot
Wood floors are not a pedestrian subject for Juell. Since 1948, he has been creating replicas of centuries-old European floors and designing contemporary wood-floor styles based on the patterns that dominate Southwestern Native American art or the paintings of Piet Mondrian.
He hangs onto methods and finishes that modern manufacturers ignore, making floors the way European craftsmen made them for centuries before the advent of mass-manufactured, smooth-as-silk wood floors. Juell’s floors are in some of the premiere houses of the North Shore, as well as in the offices of their owners. In the U.S., he has duplicated floors from Versailles, the White House and assorted chateaux in France.
At 78, he is still the man to see when a home renovation or decoration plan calls for commanding, showpiece wooden floors.
“His floors create wonderful backgrounds that are different from what is typically available because they have a handmade sensibility that is unique,” says Arlene Semel, whose Chicago interior design firm, Arlene Semel and Associates, has worked with Juell for 15 years or more.
Christy Cressey of Barrington Hills enlisted Juell to install floors last year in the house on her 600-acre ranch in Steamboat Springs, Colo., because she was trying to project a look of age and stability in an all-new setting. Juell designed a slate-and-wood floor that, Cressey says, has a stable, solid feeling.
Natural flaws
Juell’s re-creations of old floors have minute and irregular gaps between the pieces, minor flaws in the beveling (the method of fitting the edges of timbers together) and other imperfections that only bother the modern eye because it is accustomed to the uniformity that comes from large-scale manufacturing. The flaws aren’t purposeful, ersatz mistakes that look planned, but a natural part of the process of hand-building a floor.
“People sometimes ask me, `Oh, what’s wrong with this floor you did? It looks wrong,’ ” Juell says. “You have to explain that it’s hand-fit. It’s going to be loose-fitting, not like those regimented, machine-made floors. Then they realize that they see a softness to my floors that they like.”
For the recent remodeling of a 50-year-old Glencoe house, Semel wanted to extend the old pegged wideboard floors of the living room into a powder room. To capture the age, Juell handpicked wood that was aged and knotted, the likes of which most floor contractors shy away from now. They prefer a seamless, unnaturally perfect look.
The result: “Those new floors don’t look like we just put them in–they look like they came with the house,” Semel says.
Juell’s craft does not come without a price tag. He estimates that a typical job of about 1,400 square feet costs roughly $50,000.
Ways to upgrade
Generous with ideas, he suggests that people renovating on a less lavish budget upgrade existing wood floors by installing a border around the edges. For a floor with a perimeter that measures a total of 60 feet, a border would cost about $3,600.
“And you won’t need to spend anything on a dining room carpet because the floor will enhance the room so much,” he notes.
From his Merchandise Mart showroom, Juell sells a line of borders–everything from the traditional Greek key to his latest design, a series of geometrical pyramids that have a distinctly Southwest attitude.
Another border looks like a repeating pattern of bird footprints extending from a center line. He calls it chicken feet.
Whether it’s a custom-built floor or an upgrade, Juell always recommends finishing the floor the old-fashioned, labor-intensive way, with oil and beeswax. He calls the polyurethane that displaced these two materials “glass,” as in “you don’t want to put an oil painting behind a piece of glass, do you? Don’t do it to your floors either.”
Repeat performance
When Peter and Ginny Foreman bought a Gold Coast apartment for their retirement, they set about renovating the 4,300-square-foot space, which had first been one apartment, then two, then one again. She wanted to re-capture the building’s 1911 vintage while at the same time creating what she calls “sort of an Old World Italian look.” She knew this was a difficult hybrid, so she called the only floor man she had ever trusted.
Juell had pickled her Highland Park floors “back when that was very popular” some 20 years earlier, and the name had stayed fresh in her mind.
Juell recommended hickory planks in random widths, which he and his crew would age by scraping and beveling the wood by hand–a time-honored method that still is a Juell trademark. Many others in the field no longer take the time.
Details, details, details
Virtually his entire life, Juell has been working with detail and wood, the two things that are his hallmarks today. As a boy in Norway, he watched his father, a sea captain, build model ships, and his mother design hats. At 17, he went to sea on a Norwegian ship, where he had no choice but to learn to hand-scrape and install wood decks. Soon after he arrived in New York in 1936, the 20-year-old Norwegian immigrant got the tools of his apprenticeship: a pair of kneepads and a box of wood-scraping tools.
Juell learned the craft from a socially prominent New York floor man, then came to the Midwest and started a wood-floor installation business in 1948, just as the post-war housing boom was taking off.
By 1964, Juell was getting tired of what he now calls “bang-bang work–we sawed it and nailed it down, but there was no room for creativity. There were all these floors I had put in, but I wouldn’t specifically call them mine.”
A client asked if Juell could duplicate an antique French floor that had caught his fancy, and Juell had to admit he had no idea how. He cast around for an Old World craftsman who could do the work and promptly became an apprentice all over again at age 48.
Shifting from large-volume work on uniform floors to smaller, customized projects at middle age was like catching his second wind.
In the ensuing 30 years, he has built an ever-loyal clientele. Cressey, for one, waited more than a decade to get a Birger Juell floor. She first stumbled upon his Merchandise Mart showroom in 1981, when she and her husband, Bryan, were renovating their first house, a Wrigleyville Victorian.
“We couldn’t afford him then, so I waited,” she says. “When we got our house in Barrington Hills, Birger was at the top of my list. But he came out and looked at our modern, open-space house and said, `This house can’t use my floors.’ I had to wait another five years before I got my Birger Juell floors, out at the ranch.”
