Wood flooring comes in three forms: parquet laid in geometric patterns, engineered boards on a stable core suited to underfloor heating, and solid planks that can be refinished for a century, each chosen for pattern, stability or character.

Step into a room with a wide-plank oak floor in the late afternoon and the floor draws your eye down. The low light rakes across the grain, picking out every ripple and figure, and the timber gives back a soft, contained glow. Underfoot there is a particular quietness — a give, a warmth, a sense of something that was once alive. No stone or synthetic surface does this. That quality is the reason wood flooring repays the attention it so rarely receives.

For all that it is the largest surface in any room — the plane that unifies everything above it — flooring is too often left until last, chosen under time pressure from a thin range, with little thought for how it will weather a decade of footsteps. Choose it well and the furniture, joinery and lighting settle into a coherent whole. Choose it poorly and no amount of quality elsewhere quite recovers. So the question is rarely whether to use wood. It is which wood, and how to specify it so the floor still looks right in twenty years.

Our flooring collection is made within our workshop network of luxury wood flooring, working with French oak in both engineered and solid formats across a range of collections. Here is what you need to know to specify with confidence — species, pattern, grade and finish, and how each decision shapes the floor you will eventually walk on.

Parquet: the case for pattern

Parquet — wood laid in a geometric pattern rather than simple parallel planks — turns a floor from a surface into a design element. The most enduring of the patterns is herringbone, rectangular blocks set at 45 or 90 degrees so the eye reads a continuous, interlocking weave. The Versailles panel, a grid of square frames holding diagonal infills, is the most architectural of them, the kind of floor that quietly tells you which room you have walked into. Chevron, where planks are cut at an angle so their ends meet in an unbroken arrow, is the most contemporary of the classic forms — cleaner, more directional, and unforgiving of a careless joint.

There is a practical reward hidden inside all that geometry. The pattern breaks up the natural movement and tonal variation in timber far better than long parallel planks ever can, so the small shifts a floor makes through the seasons read as texture rather than fault. It makes parquet quietly forgiving in rooms with underfloor heating, or where the light falls unevenly across the day.

Engineered wood: stability for modern interiors

Engineered wood flooring is built from a real wood veneer, typically 3–6mm thick, bonded over a stable core of cross-ply plywood or HDF. Stand on it and you would never know — the top layer is genuine timber, with the same grain, the same warmth, the same finish as a solid board. What you gain is composure. Those cross-laid plies hold the board steady against the expansion and contraction that humidity drives, the movement that makes a solid floor gap, cup or bow.

For modern interiors with underfloor heating — now the standard in most new-build luxury residential and hospitality work — we recommend engineered construction without much hesitation. The core lets the heat rise through evenly, without the internal stresses that pull a solid floor apart over a warm winter. Engineered boards also sit lower, since they do not need the sub-floor depth a solid installation demands — a quiet help when floor-to-ceiling height is precious.

"A well-specified wood floor does not compete with the furniture above it. It provides a foundation that makes every other decision look better."

Solid wood: character and longevity

Solid wood — planks or blocks cut whole from a single piece of timber — remains the choice where character matters above all, and where a floor is expected to be sanded and refinished again and again across a long life. A well-kept solid oak floor can last a century or more. Each refinishing cuts back to fresh wood beneath the wear, and with it comes the chance of a new colour, a new finish, a second life for the same boards your grandparents walked on.

It suits listed and period buildings especially, where the floor has to read as honestly of its age. Wide, character-grade boards — the ones that keep their knots, their colour shifts, the small disagreements in the grain — carry a presence that even the best engineered alternative does not quite reach. We have laid floors in rooms where the boards had outlived everyone who first chose them, and there is a particular satisfaction in adding to that lineage rather than starting it over.

The collections

Our flooring range spans seven distinct collections, each with its own temperament. Biscuit is a warm, lightly brushed oak — you can feel the faint texture of the brushing under bare feet — informal and easy, and at home in a family interior. Classics holds the essential herringbone and chevron patterns in a refined mid-tone. Désir is the more dramatic of them, with deeper tones and a stronger grain for rooms that want the floor to make an entrance.

Forêt takes an end-grain approach — the timber stood on its end so you read the rings rather than the length — which lends an almost three-dimensional depth, lovely in a smaller space or set as a feature within a larger floor. Opus is a large-format plank in a calm, architectural palette. Slide is cleaner and more contemporary, in a slimmer profile. And Undici — eleven boards — is wide-plank and richly characterful, for the interior where the floor is meant to be the statement.

Specification considerations

The decisions that shape a wood floor are few but consequential: construction type (solid or engineered), species and grade, width and thickness, surface treatment (oiled, lacquered, waxed or left unfinished), and pattern. Each affects both how the floor performs and how it looks, and a handful of them, once made, cannot be undone without lifting the floor and starting again. They reward being made early, and made deliberately.

A good floor is a quiet thing. You stop noticing it within a week of moving in, and that is exactly the point — it simply holds the room together, warm and steady underfoot, while everything else takes the eye. We are glad to advise at any stage of a project, and to send samples you can lay out in the real light of the room before anything is decided. Contact us to talk it through.

Filed under Flooring Materials