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The owners of a new North Carolina home wanted a unique floor designed around the lotus flower to complement other Hindi motifs in the home.

Enter Harri Aalto, artist, designer and creative genius behind the Creative Edge Master Shop which uses space-age water jet cutting technology and hand-picked materials from around the world to create incredible masterpieces for floors, walls, memorials and architecture around the world. Harri's Creative Edge work is featured regularly in FABULOUS FLOORS.

The big challenge was with the borders which flow through rooms and hallways. Each area has to be redrawn and rescaled to the rooms to make each masterpiece work.

Working with the owners, Harri first created the artwork, then selected the stone that would be precision cut and fit and thus become a floor fit for royalty.

They settled on Jerusalem Gold limestone for the field tile, that is, the main flooring area. The decorative areas consist of Rojo Alicante, a russet marble; Celeste Blue, a high-end marble; Rosa Portugalo and Rosa Portugalo Dark, traditional Italian marble; a dark Empress Green and lighter Quetzal Guatemalan marble; Thassos, a white marble; Honey Onyx; and Crema Valencia, a yellow marble with pink veining.

The artistic design for a floor like this can take from a few weeks to a few years to complete in collaboration with the customer. Actual stone colors are filled into a computerized version, then, after two to three weeks of programming and four to six week of production, all the pieces are cut. Small pieces are subassembled and pregrouted into larger sections of up to three feet, eliminating puzzle-piecing on site. Before shipping, each piece of Aalto art is laid out on the factory floor and coded to a layout schematic for easy installation by just one or two craftsmen.■