Billiard Room, Belmont Mansion

The Billiard Room restoration at Belmont Mansion deserves its very own page. This purpose-built billiard room had been broken into three separate spaces during the 20th century. In 2020, Belmont’s curator, Jerry Trescott, decided to undertake a total restoration of the room. This required extensive demolition and tons and tons of reconstructive work.

My part was the finishes. I did all of the graining on the woodwork, designed and executed the painted ceiling, and made the floorcloth. The floorcloth is based off a strip of the original, circa 1860 floorcloth that was in the room. This piece was found beneath a partition wall during the demolition. Belmont had that remnant removed and conserved by Kelly Ciociola, and then I got to work reconstructing the design.

It was a repeating, block-printed pattern with nine colors, which imitated a carpet. For the reconstructed floorcloth, I block-printed the design using six linocuts, which I designed and carved. The fabrication took about four months and began with the basic preparation of the canvas, which came in four strips and had to be hand-sewn together, primed, and painted with the basecoat paint. This took about five weeks, and then the printing process began. The photos below show how the design changed as each consecutive block was printed.