Styles of Parquet Flooring

Today styles of parquet fall into two categories. Herring-bone parquet or Mosaic-panel parquet. The definitions of these are:

Herring-bone is solid wood blocks that can be purchased in a variety of sizes, woods and grades. These loose blocks are individually laid into the desired pattern for example herring-bone or basket-weave. This fitting requires an extreme amount of skill. Even seasoned floor fitters will shy away from fitting this parquet and leave it to the specialists. 1 or 2 mm out at the start of the pattern ends up as huge unsightly gaps on the outer edges.

Herring-bone parquet blocks are one of the cheapest forms of wooden flooring you can buy, even for the better quality grades. The down side is that to fit them is labour intensive and requires highly skilled craftsmen, this makes them quite expensive overall.

At Whittlewoods we try to keep our prices as low as possible but our craftsmen are specialists and therefore we have to pay them handsomely for their experience.

Mosaic-panel parquet is factory made panels where the parquet blocks have been arranged into their pattern already and are held in place by a paper or mesh backing. As you can imagine these large square panels are much easier to lay.  These panels include the once very popular Mosaic finger parquet, which are small blocks of wood 120 x 30 x 7.5mm laid in opposing directions in a checkerboard pattern.

A certain amount of skill is required when fitting these panels, mainly to ensure that the sub base you are fixing the floor to is good and level. Overall this is a relatively cheap form of wood flooring which provides a very good hard wearing and attractive look.

Parquet flooring has many of the advantages of other types of wooden floors, including the hygiene and the easy maintenance benefits. Please refer to our other articles for more details.  But it has an advantage over other wooden floors in that  it is more stable, this is because the small pieces of wood are arranged in different directions which results in less overall cross-grain expansion, parquet is therefore a good choice in areas where the moisture content of the flooring is expected to change significantly over time.

Although parquet has traditionally been used in areas of particularly hard wear, like hallways and schools, it is no more hard wearing than strip wood flooring, but just like other wooden floors is can be easily sanded and sealed to bring it back to its original condition.

Parquet flooring is available in solid or engineered wood blocks. Oak is possibly the most popular wood but walnut, maple, wenge, cherry,  teak, mahogany and beech also create beautiful parquet floors.

Common block sizes are 210 x 60; 230 x 70; 280 x 70; 350 x 70 these are available in 20 and 15mm thicknesses. Common Mosaic-panels are approximately 480 x 480 mm with each finger measuring 120 x 30 x 7.5mm.

Please see these examples below of Herring-Bone Parquet

To find out more about our complete and comprehensive selection of solid wood and Parquet call us now. To arrange an appointment call London 0207 125 0009, Berkshire 0118 329 0071 or click here and fill out the form to send us a message. 

Return from Styles of Parquet page to our home page