An archive of antique flooring.
Ancient Surfaces exists to put genuinely old floors back into use. We salvage stone, tile and cobblestone from buildings and streets that have already lived a long life, restore only what needs restoring, and set them down again in houses being built today.
Every floor we sell was pulled up somewhere else first, cleaned, sorted, and chosen by hand.
Old floors, reclaimed with care.
Ancient Surfaces began with a simple conviction. A floor that has already survived three hundred years is a better floor than anything made this year. So we go and find them. Estates and abbeys being taken apart in France and Spain, farmhouses in the Mediterranean, city streets in Europe being lifted for utilities, tile workshops in Morocco and Cuba that closed decades ago.
What comes back to our yard is sorted by hand. Reclaimed stone slabs for entries and living rooms, millennial limestone cut into long planks, antique cement tiles with their pattern still deep in the body, and limestone and basalt cobblestones for everything outdoors. Four collections, and between them a floor for every part of a house from the front gate to the primary suite.
We restore conservatively. Surfaces are cleaned, undersides are calibrated so everything sits flat on a modern subfloor, and thicknesses are made consistent enough to install without drama. What we never do is grind the age off the top. The wear is the reason the material is worth having.
Ancient Surfaces has appeared on the front covers of Architectural Digest in May 2011 and LUX Magazine in November 2012. We supply private residences across Manhattan, Jersey City and Newark, and ship flooring to projects nationwide and internationally, working alongside the architects, designers and installers who put it down.
Everything underfoot, from one yard.
Restraint, always.
We do not over restore. We do not reproduce. We do not sell a floor we would not put in our own house. Stock arrives when a building comes down, not when a factory decides to run a batch, so the inventory grows slowly and on purpose.