Custom Floors Design, Inc.

Custom Floors Design is a showroom business first. Its Main Street space in Stoneham is built around selection — luxury carpeting, boutique fabrics, wallpapers, and hand-made area rugs, both in stock and made to order. The company says it runs a second showroom in Bonita Springs, Florida, and that it is co-owned by Jennifer Roberts, its president, and Jermie Roberts, its executive director. One thing belongs on the table before a homeowner calls. Violation Tracker, the corporate-accountability database published by Good Jobs First, lists a federal wage-and-hour case against the company: an $8,002 penalty from the U.S. Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division, dated June 8, 2013, logged under the Davis-Bacon Act and related statutes, at a Stoneham facility. That is an old, closed agency action, and it is about how the company paid workers rather than how a floor was laid — but it is the only account of this business anyone outside the company has published, so it carries more weight here than it would against a deep history of customer write-ups. That thinness is the honest headline. There is nothing to say about how their installs go, how they handle a schedule, or what a job costs, because no one who hired them has written about it where it can be read. If you want to touch the goods before you buy — walk a showroom, compare wool against sisal, spec a custom rug — that is what this business is set up to do. Ask for photographs of recent installations and the phone numbers of two or three local customers from the past year, and get the scope and price in writing before an order is placed.