John Allgeier of Southern Vintage, a flooring and wood products specialty store in Tennessee joined up with Kimberly Greenwell to showcase a historic church-turned-apartments that used reclaimed flooring from Southern Vintage to create a flawless, restored look.
While many apartment conversions are done with little deference to the history of the building, this project in an 1800s church was all about the details. As in most projects Southern Vintage takes on, it started with a personalized consultation to understand the project needs and the client’s desired goal.
Southern Vintage offers 20 different wood species, some familiar while others are rare. In the case of this project, much of the existing flooring was Red Heart Pine, an antique wood prized as much for its durability as for its beautiful appearance. In some locations, the existing flooring was damaged or missing, but because of the age and uniqueness of the flooring, replacing and completing it was a job for the professionals at Southern Vintage.
The project involved reclaiming Red Heart Pine from other buildings and then matching it to the existing flooring. There are many pros to using reclaimed flooring, especially in apartments, as it is extremely durable, waterproof and the lived-in patina can help hide scuffs and bumps.
According to Allgeier, “reclaimed” can mean a couple of different things. It can refer to barns, where beams and siding are salvaged. This provides wood that is both brown and gray in color, depending on if the wood was exposed to the elements or on the interior of the barn. In other cases, “reclaimed” can mean taken from the inside of an old structure. This kind of reclaiming provides a lot of big beams and flooring structures that would’ve held the building up. A lot of reclaimed pine comes from this method and it works well for creating reclaimed flooring such as in the case of this project.
“There’s a couple different ways to get to reclaimed and it just depends on the look and the patina you want,” says Allgeier. He goes on to warn shoppers looking for reclaimed items to pay attention to the spelling of reclaimed materials; some companies are calling items “re-claimed” or using other marketing tricks to make first-run, new items with a vintage look seem like genuine reclaimed goods.
In addition to the custom, reclaimed wood flooring, the apartments also feature reclaimed wooden beams throughout. According to Allgeier, when it comes to choosing beams you’ve got two main choices: hand-hewn and rough sawn lumber. Hand-hewn lumber is the older, more rustic option dating from the early settlers period of the 1700s to the 1850s. These beams have ax marks in them as they were cut by hand. For this project, however, rough sawn beams were used because their smoother, saw-cut edges lend a more modern feel that blends well with stainless steel appliances and modern leather furniture.
Greenwell points out that many homeowners are looking to layer a rustic look with a lot of new, modern accents and Allgeier agrees. He says he’s seeing more customers pairing white cabinets with live-edge counters and using wood that’s taken from trains to create beautiful countertops to create a modern vintage aesthetic that’s as beautiful as it is unique.
