Floor Artistry

Rory Conway is an artist who happens to paint floors. Well, he paints other areas of the house, but painting floors, he says, “is where my heart is.” He is also a painter in the traditional sense, spending time in his Springs studio laying paint on canvas.

In his 25-year career he has focused on several aspects of the decorative arts including restoration, tackling projects such as Guild Hall in East Hampton and the First Presbyterian Church in Southampton. And let’s not forget the classic yacht he rebuilt and refinished.

The Dublin born and bred artist has a reputation for the fine finishes in his interior and exterior painting both commercial and residential. For one of the Ralph Lauren stores in East Hampton he veered away from the posh country house look of inside the store to apply high-gloss oil enamel to the exterior. The resulting “showcase effect” so impressed the powers that be in the company’s corporate headquarters that Conway was dispatched across the country as far afield
as La Jolla to transform other stores.

Heading home from one such project he received a last-minute call at the airport beckoning him to reroute to San Francisco, where he was tasked with revamping an outpost of Club Monaco (an apparel chain owned by Polo Ralph Lauren). “I had to take over and redo something that hadn’t been done properly. It had taken three men five days but it took me alone less than a week, working by hand.” And he didn’t even have his tools in tow.

Conway’s go-to finish is almost always a high-gloss sheen. “It exudes quality and luxuriousness,” he says. And it “holds its brilliance,” lasting twice as long “if done properly,” as the more popular semi-gloss and satin finishes.

But Conway’s true love is painting floors. He painted the floor of Tory Burch’s East Hampton shop twice. “I didn’t want to do it in a generic way where you stencil a pattern and put clear coats on top.” Instead he “wanted to do something very special.” His process was to “drop the paint onto the surface,” a technique that resulted in “one coat having the effect of several coats. I wanted the pattern to lift off the floor with an embossed effect.”

For his second floor, he had a huge stencil made up in New York. Then he hand painted off-white atop a deep purple background (the colors were dictated by Burch) till he felt that the pattern “floated,” he says. In keeping with a fashion house theme, he “wanted to make a textile finish – loose and gay – a twinkling effect.”

Meanwhile he’s in demand by decorators to put his talent to work on residential floors. He has painted many a decorative floor. And he’s huddled by his studio’s woodburning stove rendering dynamic paintings intended to hang in modern homes.