We have a new guest article to share from the pros at Luxury Flooring and Furnishings, of Leeds, UK. [excerpt=Morgan Mitchell]When many people think of parquet flooring, they normally imagine the 70’s style short planked, dark wood such as walnut or rich oak, but those days are gone, as parquet flooring can be incorporated with whitewash woods and other colors to keep it fresh and modern. As well as this, parquet is as easy to install as a tile, simply interlocking together with a groove mechanism.[/excerpt] Read the whole article here: The Resurgence of Parquet Flooring - How Parquet Flooring Is Coming Back Into Fashion Please comment here or on the article.
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.
Chris and others, if you have the time and wherewithal, you could have an article published too. We (TFP website) could sure use it.
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.