The Resurgence of Parquet

I hope not. I hated installing it

 

I went down a rabbit hole of researching parquetry, marquetry and intarsia some time ago and it really opened up my eyes to just exactly what options are available to the consumer besides the typical pattern that we think of when someone says parquet. Thanks for posting this, Jim. Staying ahead of the curve makes us look good.

 

I recall struggling with cheaper grade 6" x 6" fingerblock parquet tongue and groove glue downs in large rooms in schools when I was an apprentice. Then it became very rare that we'd do any but when we did it would be a much nicer quality product in higher end office space---------like the CEO of General Dynamics top floor office with a helicopter pad right above. That was some nice quality wood.

It's really about the quality of the wood and the possibility of patterns and designs. Like with beef there's prime cuts of filet mignon...............and then there's tripe------what we would feed to the cats or the hogs. Being in Southern California many of my friends like to eat menudo which is soup made from cow guts. I find it disgusting.

I use that analogy because I also find a lot of the flooring made from garbage wood products similarly offensive. In fact they often smell worse than the cow gut soup.

 

We did tons of 12"x12" oak parquet in the 80's. Back then the refinishers were struggling with it on how to sand and refinish the stuff so someone came up with the square buff system for it. It phased out in the late 80's and haven't seen any since.