Showroom

The Hudson Company

A custom wood mill in the Hudson Valley making reclaimed and specialty flooring, panelling, and beams.

The Hudson Company is a custom mill, not a flooring retailer, and the distinction runs through everything on the floor at 5 East 20th Street. The company has been working out of the Hudson Valley since 1995, with the mill at Pine Plains, and it handles the whole chain itself: sourcing, deconstruction, grading, milling and prefinishing.

What it carries is timber in two forms. Reclaimed stock comes out of buildings taken down, and it arrives with the grain, nail holes and patina that only age produces. Purpose cut new wood covers everything the reclaimed supply cannot, in a wide range of species. Both go out as flooring, panelling or beams. Either can be solid or engineered, and either can arrive prefinished or raw. Non standard plank widths and board lengths are the mill's ordinary work rather than a special order, which is the fact that decides whether a large room reads as boards or as a floor.

The showroom itself was fitted out by Brad Ford and shares the address with Atlas Industries. It is open Monday to Friday from 9 to 5, on a Flatiron side street at grade, and no appointment is needed for a first look.

What a designer goes there for is width and length, not species. The samples on a card are all cut to the same size, so they answer the colour question and hide the one that matters. Standing on a laid board of the actual width is what tells you whether a room takes a seven inch plank or needs a ten.

Reclaimed and new are not interchangeable and the lead times differ, so decide which the scheme needs before the mill is asked to quote. A reclaimed floor depends on what has come out of a building that month, and a specification written around it needs slack in the programme that a new cut floor does not.