Bleeker. Bowery. Lexington. Names of streets that run up and down New York City, the Big Apple of the Empire State and beyond.
Influence. Swagger. Grit. The word “empire” covers it all.
WD Flooring’s Empire Collection uses those street names and that range of attitude in its style. The collection showcases WD’s empire of creativity unlike any other.
Showing Creativity in Wood Flooring
With its Empire Collection, WD breaks the boundaries of how flooring lines are put together. It pulls from its history of custom wood flooring projects, one-offs that show what’s possible.
Flooring collections often have themes of color and/or texture. WD offers those, like other wood flooring manufacturers do. Its Tsiu River highlights the possibilities of gray flooring. Its High Plains offers classic colors. And its Otter Creek focuses on rugged, reclaimed texture. All good. All have purpose.
But Empire. That’s something done differently.
“Each product stands on its own,” says Joe Verich, Executive Vice President. “Empire represents the summit of how we view taking chances in the market. It shows our range of creativity, what’s possible when we collaborate with clients for custom results.”
Take Sutton, the herringbone walnut in the Empire. Want hand-scraping? WD has skilled craftsman that can take prefinished Sutton flooring and put the personal touch you want on it. Engineered, solid, color, texture, length. WD is happy to adjust and accommodate.
Want double-grooved flooring that requires an expert installer to glue spline into each board for uniquely customized tongue placements and just-right finished results? Doable.
WD Flooring: Flexible + Made-to-Order
“We offer around 50 prefinished wood flooring designs for convenience to our customers, but in reality those are just the beginning ideas,” says Peter Connor, fourth-generation owner of WD Flooring.
“We can put those in front of a customer and say, ‘OK, choose where you want to begin and tell us where you want to end up.’ And we can all go to that creative, one-of-a-kind place together. It’s those kinds of conversations that brought out the floors that make up Empire.”
WD Flooring knows its niche. A mashup of flexible mass production that is made-to-order.
Its products are harvested sustainably on a 10-year rotation from within its 60,000 acres of hardwood forest in Wisconsin. Located in Laona, a town of fewer than 1,000 people, WD carries out forest to floor production. One hundred years and counting.
“With us, people feel good about where their floor comes from,” Peter says. “It’s American-grown and American-made. It’s CARB II compliant. The carbon footprint is much smaller for us to produce flooring and ship it from Wisconsin to, say, Colorado, than if we were sourcing trees from China.
“And while it takes a little bit of patience for us to produce each floor upon order, our customers get the unique floor they dreamed of and, often, helped to design.”
In Wisconsin, WD is custom crafting an Empire state of mind.