I recently visited the Brooklyn Museum, where I stumbled upon a fascinating exhibit: Decorative Arts & Period Rooms. The rooms in the Brooklyn Museum are focused largely on local domestic spaces that have been carefully dismantled from original homes to be displayed in the museum.
In the collection preserved from The Cupola House in Edenton, N.C., circa 1725, I found a real treasure: painted floor cloths. These cloths were the most popular floor coverings in 18th-Century American interiors, and they were imported from England or painted locally to simulate marbles and other elegant stone floors. The cloths were practical for heavily used rooms and easy to clean, much like linoleum. It made me smile to see that even then, homeowners were chasing the look they wanted in theirs floors, much like the simulated wood and stone we see emulated in tile and resilient floors today.