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

by erik schoning • photos by alex barreto

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, bringing their children along on the journey right from the start. Today, Nigro, 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.

“My brothers and I always helped from the beginning,” Nigro recalled. “We grew up in the business – picking up spacers, cleaning up the job sites. That’s all we knew. We went to school, and after that, we went into the business.”

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

Tile, flooring, and stonework have evolved a great deal since 1977. Tile Loft embraces that spirit of change, looking boldly toward the needs and demands of the next generation of homeowners. As millennials and Gen Z buy their first homes and bring a new sensibility to design, Nigro and his team at Tile Loft have kept abreast of the shifting tides. For example, recent years have seen increased demand in large format tiles, a trend that follows 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 vast 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. 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 100 or more 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. 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 positions itself. 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 who’s ever embarked on a home renovation knows, almost always runs into snags or delays. Shower doors require absolute precision, and few contractors can match Tile Loft’s record in that department.

In home design, tastes change, trends fizzle out, and new ones take their place. These days, Nigro’s clients are clamoring for waterjet mosaic tiles, intricately decorated tiles that are machine-cut using high-pressure water jets. Nigro is also seeing a resurgence in the popularity of vintage styles, from checkered tile to subway tile, in modern colors from mint to mauve. (“We have a joke about this,” Nigro 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. The process is simple: a client has a need, and a contractor steps up to meet it. That, after all, is how the business began.

all the way back in the 1970s. In that regard, no matter how much things change, the core of Tile Loft remains the same.

“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 bring 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