Walking into the Reed Floors showroom on Santa Claus Lane in Carpinteria, it’s easy to see that this is no ordinary flooring company. The concrete-floor warehouse environment has given way here to a warm and welcoming designed space featuring wool carpeting, orchids, tasteful hardwood and inviting sofas.
“We want you to love your flooring experience,” says French-born proprietor Romain Doussineau, who brought a lifelong commitment to service with him when he purchased the company in 2010, “and it starts here.”
“Service” is a word that gets tossed around a lot, but Doussineau has it in his bones. He grew up in France, working at his parents’ hotel. He trained as a chef, then spent years cooking in top French restaurants. To spend more time with his first child, he left the kitchen to create the first mobile auto-detailing business in France. After performing multi-million-dollar renovations on several homes in the south of France, he and his family moved to the U.S. and eventually acquired Reed Floors, which he operates upon a three-cornered commitment to service: “We source for you. We work for you. We care for you.”
Doussineau’s translation is straightforward: “It’s important for people to have someone they trust,” he says. “We respect our clients. We never forget that we are working in their house, so we’re always on time, we don’t play loud music on the job, and we leave everything clean. And we guarantee our installations for a lifetime, so if anything goes wrong, we fix it.”
Whatever is available, Reed can get it for a customer. “We have created a kind of flooring design center here to save our clients – designers, architects and home owners – the long trip down the coast and back,” he says. “We are a source of ideas, and I’m always looking for something different and better.”
Reed provides a wide selection of top-quality flooring for every budget, plus carpeting; rugs both pre-made and custom in such fabrics as wool, jute, sisal and abaca; and wall coverings in cork, leather and wood. They even carry an exclusive line of very wide, very long plank hardwood flooring made from trees reclaimed from rivers in Mexico, as well as leather flooring that Doussineau describes as “beautiful and resilient.” All of Reed’s woods are either reclaimed or harvested sustainably.
“I’m in the timber business,” he says, “so sustainability is a no-brainer.” Clients can work with in-house designer Penny Sebastian, and floor installer Rick Ashton creates a range of exquisite in-home finishes and treatments. “He has gold in his hands,” Dousinneau says with a smile. “The people I work with are the kind of people you don’t want your competition to have.”
