A multigenerational flooring and tile business builds on a legacy of quality and craftsmanship in Italian masonry

By Erik Schoning

Marco Nigro was born and raised in the tile business. His father and uncles, Italian masons who emigrated stateside, worked union jobs and imported tile on the side, brought their children along on the journey right from the start. Today, Marco, his brother Vincent and business partner John Greco carry on that rich legacy with Tile Loft, the latest iteration of a business built from the ground up by their father, Gaetano Nigro: Ideal Tile.

“Me and my brothers always helped from the beginning,” Nigro remembers. “We grew up with it — picking up spacers, cleaning up the job site. That’s all we knew. We went to school, and after school, we went into the business.”

That business was founded on a simple premise: to offer the best and highest quality tile, imported directly from trusted partners back on the continent, and to see the entire process through from design to delivery to installation. Today, helmed by Marco and Vincent Nigro, together with new partner John Greco, Tile Loft and expanded to three showrooms in New Jersey, in Edison, Freehold and Middletown. Today the business’s footprint is as large as ever, but its roots remain unchanged.

Tile, flooring and stonework has changed a lot since 1977. Tile Loft embraces that spirit of change, looking boldly towards the needs and demands of a next generation of homeowners. As millenials buy their first homes and bring a new sensibility to design, Nigro and his team at Tile Loft have kept abreast of the changing tides. For example, recent years have seen increased demand in large format tiles, in keeping with a simple principle: the larger the tile, the larger-seeming the space. (By large, we mean large: Nigro and his team routinely install tiles that measure as large as 48” by 48”.)

“The thing about large format is it’s much harder to install,” Nigro said. “So it’s eliminated a lot of the basic installers out there. Now you need a professional installation crew. You need the handling machinery. You need two or three people just to hold the material to install it. And that’s where our experience shines. We’ve been doing this for decades.”

Porcelain tile is prized for its durability, pairing the look of stone with the low maintenance factor of manufactured materials. But all porcelain isn’t created equal, and Nigro and the Tile Loft team have found a consistent edge over the years by being able to offer higher quality, more luxurious porcelain than their big box competitors.

“If you go to these plants in Italy, they’ve been in the family for a hundred years,” Nigro said. “Then the kids, the grandkids take over, and they keep on developing new technology to make their product better. It’s very hard to tell if you put the real stone next to a porcelain tile. The image is almost exact. Even the texture, the feel of the tile is the same, where it’s not just an image. It’s actually the veining you can feel in the stone.”

That line between the timeless and the cutting-edge is exactly where Tile Loft wants to be. Beyond their tile work, Nigro and his team have specialized in fabrication in recent years, adding countertop and kitchen fabrication to an already deep portfolio of services. In the last few years, they’ve added shower doors to the list, aiming to bring that same legacy of quality and craftsmanship to a service that, as anyone whose ever done a home renovation knows, almost always falls into snags, troubles or delays. Shower doors require absolute perfection, and few contractors can match Tile Loft’s record in that department.

Tastes change, trends fizzle out and new ones take their place. These days his clients are clamoring for waterjet mosaic tiles, intricately decorated tiles that are cut by machine using high pressure water jets. And Nigro is seeing a striking resurgence in the popularity of vintage style, from checkered tile to subway tile, in strikingly modern colors from mint to mauve. (“We have a joke around this,” Nigri said. “It’s a big circle. It all comes back if you wait long enough.”). But when a client walks in the door, those big-picture concerns fall away. Things become rather simple: a client has a need and a contractor steps up to meet it. That, after all, is how the business began, way back in the 1970s. And in that regard, no matter how much things change, the core of Tile Loft is the same as it ever was.

“We’re still a family business,” Nigro said. “My father still drives around and comes to the store to check up on us. My mother will still brings us lunch if we want it — we’re still her kids. Our business is a big thing to us. But if you have family, you don’t need anything else.”

Tile Loft

4345 US-9 Unit 14, Freehold / 732) 462-0315
Captain’s Plaza, 691 US-1, Edison / 732.819.8000
1876 NJ-35, Middletown Township / 732) 320-9300
tileloft.net