Fantastic Flooring

Dave Marzalek freely admits he was far more interested in being creative as a child than in being a good student.

“In second grade, when I got in trouble, I was always drawing football players and copying magazines and stuff like that,” says the 63-year-old native Californian. “My dad was an architect, and he showed me how to draw a human and I was always doing artwork. I got bored in high school and left in 12th grade to work for a hardwood flooring company. I started doing regular floors, just sand and finish, and then I started doing mosaic borders.

He recalls working in Mammoth Lakes and that a client, who collected American Indian art, had a copy of a Smithsonian magazine lying on a table.
“I was having lunch and reading it and I found this Navajo war bonnet,” he shares. “I said I’ll buy the wood if you will allow me to put this in your floor and the rest is history.”
Marzalek won his first two Wood Floor of the Year honors from the National Wood Flooring Association in 1996. He has earned a total of 19 awards and now is one of the preeminent wood floor artists in the world.
Last October, Marzalek put on one of the “schools” that he is noted for and drew 33

students and 14 instructors to Ocala for five days of crafting amazing wood floors. The action took place at the home of Bradley Kidder, the owner of Precision Wood Floors LLC and himself a master wood flooring artisan.
Over the five days of the DM Hardwood Designs School, nearly every floor in Kidder’s home was transformed into a work of art. Marzalek drew all of the designs.
The students came from around the nation, and Canada and Australia. Marzalek brought in cooks to prepare meals for the “campers,” many of whom would work from dawn to well past midnight on their creations. Several workstations were set up around the home, outfitted with all of the tools needed to get the jobs done.
Helping with the work was another Ocala wood flooring expert, Matt Marwick, owner of Precision Floorcrafters Inc.

“Everyone was bouncing around and helping everybody,” Marwick offers. “It was a nice way to meet people in our industry and to see the camaraderie and how they do things.”
And, he adds, with a grin, “Dave’s philosophy is no rules, be creative, and he kind of paddles against the flow, so it was fun.”
Many of the materials used during the school were donated by sponsors. One, for example, donated $16,000 worth of walnut wood, a lot of which was used by Marwick to craft beautiful steps from the lower to upper floor.
One of the more dramatic designs to come out of the school depicts two alligators circling each other. The outer rim features distinctive dark wooden inlays.
“I found this wood from one of my suppliers that I get exotic wood from. It came from Brazil,” Marzalek says, holding up a thin slice of the wood that forms the outer circle. “It grew that way. We had the tree sliced. This is my version of coral in the water.”
That floor has LED lights embedded into the design, making for a striking presentation when illuminated.
An October 2024 article on woodfloorbusiness.com quotes Kidder as saying about the school: “There was so much going on; we got so much installed in five days. The talent was just crazy with so many people … there were probably a few people that were intermediate but probably 75 percent of the students were already advanced installers.”
Because of that, the article notes, Marzelek and Kidder didn’t have to give much direction to the students working on the floor in Kidder’s game room.

“It’s a Bordeaux pattern with a twist: Instead of multiple tiles of Bordeaux parquet, the entire floor is one huge Bordeaux pattern. Students Benny Powell, Christian Mocanu and Andrew Burk were the main installers for the floor, with Jessica Colpron assisting on the border. The main wood is Goodwin Heart Pine’s Antique Long Leaf Blue Sap pine, and the triangular border is comprised of American cherry and walnut, with pine in a soldier pattern on the perimeter. Once the flooring was installed, students practiced hand-scraping—a signature technique of Marzalek’s.”
Marzalek says he did his first school in 2000 in Pennsylvania for one of his sponsors.
“We did a showroom, and I found out that I had a love for teaching. I’m also a big God guy and God gave me the talent to give to others,” he recalls. “My school traveled around. I’m the flooring gypsy. I followed my son. He was in the Army, and we had a school at his house in Texas. Bradley was a student, so that’s how we met.”
Before the school took place in Ocala, Marzalek and others produced some custom woodwork in the kitchen and game room, and one floor in an upstairs bedroom.
“This floor actually got like 30,000 likes on Facebook,” Marzalek says, sweeping his hand around the bedroom. “This floor took me two months. This wood was all hand cut.”

“I took 44 years to get here and I’m still learning. I learn from them, you know, the different ways they do things,” Marzalek says of people like Marwick and Kidder, as he points out one element in a large rectangular floor. “Like when Bradley put that eagle in the way he did it with the router, that was an interesting way of doing that.”
Kidder, who is originally from Titusville but has been in Marion County since he was 15, says he started doing wood floors in 2006, “pretty much commercial work doing jam stages, dance floors.” He has become known for his gymnasiums and works in several southeastern states, including Georgia and South Carolina.
Marwick grew up in Ocala and attended Osceola and Vanguard schools before getting a college degree in art. He did some flooring work as a summer job and soon realized that would be more profitable than trying to make a living as an artist. His clients now are all over the country and in the Bahamas and include “a lot of sports people, celebrities and hedge fund guys.” He is a five-time winner of the Wood Floor of the Year award.
“Dave has won more awards with the National Wood Flooring Association than any other person, so in his time in the industry, he has had a really good run,” Kidder notes. Sweeping his glance around the incredible flooring artworks in his home he adds, “I feel like I won the Dave Marzalek lottery.”
“I’m a very decent name in the industry worldwide,” Marzalek says with sincerity. “I’m still doing it because I love what I do.”