When the Floor Is Already a Painting: Reading Nate Berkus's Lincoln Park Entry

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 18, 2026 | 4 MIN READ When the Floor Is Already a Painting: Reading Nate Berkus's Lincoln Park Entry At a Glance A new Nate Berkus and Lauren Buxbaum Gordon townhouse landed in 1stDibs Introspective this weekend with a small painting hung directly above a Rojo Alicante and Nero Marquina marble checkerboard. The floor is doing more work in the photograph than the wall is, and that's worth thinking about before anyone copies the look. I was reading the new 1stDibs Introspective tour of the Nate Berkus and Lauren Buxbaum Gordon Lincoln Park townhouse, published 17 May, and I stopped on the entry hall photograph longer than I usually do. The Introspective writer notes the house is “a pair of 19th-century brick row houses that were combined by previous owners into a single 7,000-square-foot, six-bedroom residence.” So this is a serious envelope: tall, narrow, doubled, the kind of Chicago row-house geometry that makes the entry the visual key of everything behind it. And what Berkus and Buxbaum Gordon chose to put in that key was a checkerboard of Rojo Alicante and Nero Marquina marble underfoot, an Alejo Palacios painting on the wall above, and a set of iron-and-glass doors framing the threshold to the living room. Lauren Buxbaum Gordon told the magazine the doors “give both an industrial feel and a French vibe. It made everything feel a little bit edgier.” Fair enough. The doors are working hard. But nobody in the piece talks about what the floor is doing to the painting , and that’s the conversation I want to have. Why a marble checkerboard reorders the painting above it A red-and-black marble checkerboard isn’t a neutral floor. It’s a pattern with a very specific visual frequency: equal-sized squares, hard contrast, repeating at a rate the eye reads as a beat. In painting terms, that’s already a composition. It’s already doing the job a painting on the wall would normally do: set rhythm, set value contrast, give the eye somewhere to land. A checkerboard floor is already a painting. The work on the wall has to either rhyme with it or refuse it; sitting on the fence reads as confusion. What that means for the Palacios above it is that the painting now has three possible relationships to the room, not the usual one. It can rhyme: pick up the red, pick up the value structure, beat with the floor at a related rhythm. It can refuse: go soft, go atmospheric, go to a frequency the floor isn’t using, and let the contrast between the two carry the room. Or it can ignore the floor, which is the option most photographs of marble-checkerboard entries default to, and which almost always reads as the painting losing. In the Introspective image, the Palacios is hung at standard eye-line, modest in scale relative to the wall, and the iron-and-glass doors behind it cut a second strong rectilinear pattern into the frame. So the painting is contending with two patterned competitors, not one. It needs to either carry a colour the rest of the room cannot suppl