Carlisle Wide Plank Floors

Carlisle Wide Plank Floors was founded in New Hampshire in 1965 by Frank Talarico Sr. and has spent six decades producing custom hardwood flooring from the wide-plank format that characterizes the Colonial and Federal-period American floor. The wide plank, which is historically defined as a board of seven inches or more in width, was the standard floor material in the American houses built before the industrial timber industry standardized the narrower three-and-a-quarter-inch strip flooring that the twentieth-century floor installation industry used almost universally. The restoration of wide plank floors to their historical proportions is particularly relevant to Georgetown’s stock of Federal-period buildings.

The Georgetown Prospect Street showroom at 3251, which shares the address with Peacock Cafe and is in the Prospect Street commercial cluster, provides the Georgetown residential renovation market with direct access to the Carlisle product line. The Georgetown homeowner who is renovating a Federal-period townhouse and wants to restore the wide plank floors to their historical dimensions, or who is installing new floors in a renovation and wants the character of the historical floor without the complications of reclaimed original material, is the specific Georgetown customer that Carlisle’s showroom serves.

The Carlisle product line covers the full range of the wide plank floor market: the fresh-sawn hardwoods from American oak, walnut, cherry, and maple sources; the reclaimed wood from the nineteenth-century timber that was salvaged from demolition projects; and the end-grain floors that the industrial timber tradition developed in factory and workshop settings and that have become a design feature in the residential market.

Hours run Monday through Saturday. The Georgetown Federal-period house is particularly well-suited to the wide plank floor: the original floors in the neighborhood’s nineteenth-century townhouses were laid in wide plank oak or pine, and the restoration of these floors to their historical format using the Carlisle product provides the most architecturally appropriate treatment for the Georgetown renovation. The Carlisle showroom at 3251 Prospect Street is in the Prospect Street commercial cluster that includes the Peacock Cafe and the Carlisle Wide Plank Floors showroom. The Prospect Street location gives Carlisle access to the Georgetown residential renovation market from an address in the heart of the neighborhood that the flooring product serves. The selection of the wide plank floor involves several specification decisions that the showroom visit helps resolve: the species of wood, which ranges from the red and white oaks that have been the traditional Georgetown floor through the walnut, cherry, and hickory that offer different color and character; the finish, from the natural-oil finish that allows the wood to breathe through the hardwax oil and the water-based polyurethane; and the grade, which determines the character of the grain and the presence or absence of knots and mineral streaks. The Carlisle product’s availability in custom lengths and widths allows the Georgetown homeowner to specify the floor to the historical dimensions of the original. Hours run Monday through Saturday.