Friday, January 29, 2010

J'Adore: (Real) Hand Scraped Wood Floors

Living in Paris is like living in a piece of art. Take our apartment for instance. I mean, who does molding like that anymore? Seriously.

But after living here for almost three weeks I'm noticing more. Just the other day I noticed these waves on the floor of our dining room.

At first I wondered what they were, and then I remembered this painting by Gustave Caillebotte:

After seeing this painting again I realized that these amazing herringbone wood floors are the real deal, hand scraped by real human beings, not some machine in a factory (and I have to admit, I definitely am not a fan the faux hand scraped wood floors that are all the rage these days. I guess I just have a problem with anything that pretends to be something it's not).

This picture could have been painted in our apartment, and I just imagine all those years ago people actually knelt on those hard floors to scrape them smooth. Or almost smooth.

Like so many things, the beauty is in the imperfection.

2 comments:

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Chelsea Jane said...

Wow, now I'm looking at our floors too. I love any trace of ordinary, day to day human life like that.