Floors to take your breath away

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It's an affordable luxury. Art for the floor. One exquisite accent or a total transformation. It's your choice.

Who would have thought that technology could trigger a new art form just as tile and stone flooring were undergoing a Renaissance? Who could have dreamed that flooring could be so spectacular? Most of all, who would ever have thought that these floors could actually be so affordable?

The images you see here and on the next three pages are the result of a sense of art and a canny sense for business.

About 20 years ago, Harvard-trained businessman and expert in machine technology Jim Belilove, teamed with artist and sculptor artist Harri Aalto, recognized the possibilities for creating a new art form in interior design by leveraging a new technology.

Sure, the process was proven to be so precise that NASA was using it to precision-cut the tiles on the space shuttle, but the then-new technology of waterjet cutting and computerization was essentially lost on folks working with architectural materials.

In those days two decades ago, the waterjet had three applications: first, aerospace to cut expensive metals (like titanium) without heat or distortion, second, oddly enough, disposable diapers because of its ability to cut through dissimilar materials, and third, food, like slicing pepperoni, olives and green beans because of the precision cuts — that and there was no need to continually sharpen equipment. (Cutting with purified water at high pressure meant virtually no food contamination.)

It was the artist Aalto who recognized that waterjet machines could be the single most important thing to happen to stone in a millennium. "We get the credit for recognizing the potential which waterjet technology presented for architectural materials," Belilove says. "Even now, after 20 years, people working with stone and tile still don't realize what this process can do, which is to create shapes that were thought to be impossible."

Continued