Dallas businessman Saad Chehabi wants people to walk all over his company.
The 35-year-old owner of Ancient Venetian Floor Co. gets a particular kick out of the fact that Oprah Winfrey and Sylvester Stallone have his intricate mosaic designs under foot at their Florida retreats.
Oprah chose several tasteful medallions highlighted with unusual red onyx for different rooms of her Miami resort home. Sylvester went for large-scale flash, using a 5-foot centerpiece medallion surrounded by eight slightly smaller, 4-foot circular designs.
“I haven’t seen it, but the room must be very large,” Chehabi says in typical subdued understatement about Rocky’s rock-solid floor. “It’s a huge octagonal design.”
Not only does Chehabi provide terra firma to the stars, his tables, floors, countertops and wall accents grace Las Vegas resorts, chic hotels and distinctive Dallas homes. He’s working on a $20,000 table that’s truly fit for an Arabian prince.
Recently, he turned a few heads at the International Builders Show, where 65,000 convention goers from 93 countries could run their hands over exotic marble, onyx, lapis and even ruby pieced together by Italian stonecutters.
“To appreciate the floors, you have to see and touch them,” Chehabi says as he absent-mindedly strokes one of the floor medallions in his Dallas Design District warehouse. “Pictures don’t give them justice.”
The geometric mosaics closely resemble those crafted in 12th- and 13th-century Italian churches right down to the uneven surface and worn patina polished by hundreds of years of foot traffic.
“As complicated as our designs are, it takes as much time to do the finish because it’s a several-step process and then you have to polish every stone by hand,” he says. “With a smooth or regular tabletop you can put it under a machine, and it will make it all flat. You can’t with our bumpy finish, because it will make it all flat.”
In 1992, while on a European buying trip with an antique dealer friend, Chehabi was struck by the beauty of artisan floors in San Marco Cathedral in Venice and decided to re-create them.
“The U.S. is such a new country, I felt this would be something appreciated by Americans,” says the Syrian-born naturalized U.S. citizen.
Three months later, the passionate shutterbug loaded up his camera gear and headed back to Rome and Venice.
“I probably took 5,000 pictures,” he says, not an easy undertaking since many churches prohibit photography. “I’d go in when they had huge crowds and sneak the pictures. I did a lot without flash, but when I needed flash, I just did it.”
He gave three designs to a dozen different Italian stonecutting workshops and hired those who produced them the best. By February 1993, he was officially in business.
Frankly, his folks thought he was losing his marbles.
“I wanted to have something of my own,” he explains. “I’ve always had that artistic difference from my family.”
Chehabi never thought success would come cheaply.
“I decided I had to do it right and spend money,” he says, figuring that his start-up costs ran a cool million. “We want to enter the market very strong.”
He spent $22,000 on his first ad a full-page spread in Architectural Digest because he felt he could reach the designers, architects and end users at once.
And he was brazen to boot, listing his prices, even though that’s considered gauche for the grande dame of design magazines.
“I did it to show that they’re really affordable,” he says of 60-inch medallions used for either floors or tables that wholesale for $5,000 to $8,000. “Our dining tables are probably less expensive than fine wood.”
His strategy paid off. The ad and the prices caught the eye of the design firm working on the Caesar’s Palace addition in Las Vegas, and he landed his first big deal for tables.
About the same time, the Mirage saw his stuff at a tile and stone exposition in Florida and placed a major order for flooring.
“We made money right off,” Mr. Chehabi says. “We’ve kept basically the same prices with some minor adjustments throughout the United States.”
Chehabi continues to believe that to make money you have to spend money 15 percent of his annual budget goes to marketing and advertising.
And when it brings in a lead, he isn’t afraid to go after it. A recent advertisement drew interest from a customer in the United Arab Emirates. “Having a Middle Eastern background I knew the family name, so I sent an exceptional package with samples that cost probably $500 and paid to Federal Express about 150 pounds.”
That’s how he got the deal for the $20,000 table for one of the royal palaces.
Today, his hard wares can be seen in 22 showrooms around the country, including John Edward Hughes Inc. in the Dallas Design District. Just how many millions worth the reps sold last year remains Chehabi’s secret.
The hottest market is Florida, where his most expensive floor was installed last year in the lobby of an office-retail building in Fort Lauderdale. It cost $100,000 and used semiprecious blue lapis lazuli.
“Kind of like Texas in the ’80s,” he says with a laugh.
Dallas designer Richard Trimble was among the first to incorporate Chehabi’s products into his luxury residential projects several years ago. He’s particularly impressed by Chehabi’s knack for finding “extinct” marbles, those that aren’t mined or quarried anymore but show up as salvage from old buildings and floors.
“Saad offers fine craftsmanship of the stone and materials. He has an excellent eye for composition,” Trimble says. “Because he’s pretty high-end, I don’t think the Fox & Jacobs types are going to be putting them in.”
No, but Chehabi’s working on a new, lower-cost line that could bring stone mosaics within reach of those with champagne tastes on chardonnay budgets.
By midyear, he hopes to have a new plant in the Middle East (he isn’t saying where) with cheaper labor turning out simpler designs with flat surfaces that don’t require labor-intensive hand finishing.
He intends to send Italians over to set up shop in what could become an interesting multicultural manufacturing experiment.
“It will be expensive to keep Italian managers there, but we have to do it. Otherwise, we’ll have trouble with quality control,” he says.
Expanding the new line is important because growth is constrained by the ability to hire and train skilled workers needed for the current products.
Chehabi says he’s increasing production as fast as he can, but demand is outpacing him. “That’s another reason we don’t lower our prices,” he says coyly.
Managing the global logistics of stone floors is an intricate process all by itself.
First you have to find the marble and semiprecious stones. (No granite, please. It’s too pedestrian.)
“We circle the world looking for the stones. We look for unusual color or a lot of veining, which makes it look like a painting,” he says. “It’s become a fetish for me. Everywhere I go, I look for stones.”
