Somebody looked at the decorative parquet borders in old Brooklyn houses and decided the correct response was to build an enormous website about them. FloorBorders.com now catalogs 322 examples of face-nailed parquetry borders from roughly the 1880–1920 period, which is exactly the kind of obsessive documentation the open Web is good at.
The collection concentrates on the thin, face-nailed parquet flooring found in older Brooklyn buildings, especially work from the peak period around 1890–1915. Instead of treating those floors as background decoration, the site breaks their patterns into families and studies how they were actually assembled.
There are 16 major pattern groups divided into 62 subgroups. Categories include feature strips, corner knots, meanders and Greek keys, folded ribbons, twisted ribbons and chains. Once you start looking closely, a floor that initially reads as “fancy old wood” turns into a vocabulary of repeated geometric systems.
Pictures Are Only the Beginning
The site goes well beyond a photo gallery. It includes 20 pages of measured drawings and 12 spreadsheets for calculating piece dimensions. There is also a location map, historical material, scans from old catalogs and discussion of the woods and construction methods used in the floors.
That makes it useful to more than architecture tourists. A woodworker trying to reconstruct a damaged border can study the geometry. A preservationist can compare patterns. A researcher can connect surviving floors to period catalogs and manufacturing practices.
The site map reportedly spans hundreds of pages. This is what happens when a narrow subject is given enough attention that it stops being narrow.
Documentation Nobody Was Obligated to Make
In a Brownstoner discussion, the site’s creator described starting the project after looking through Brooklyn houses and realizing there was little consolidated information about the borders he kept seeing. He photographed examples and documented what he learned while installing face-nailed flooring himself.
That origin matters. FloorBorders.com is not an institutional preservation database assembled because a grant required one. It is the result of somebody encountering a hole in the available knowledge and filling it.
Modern search engines are very good at answering broad questions. They are less dependable when the question becomes, “What is the geometry of this specific 120-year-old parquet border in a Brooklyn brownstone?” Fortunately, someone already went down that rabbit hole and left the ladder in place.