Parquet Flooring in Bristol

The Georgian drawing rooms of Clifton and Kingsdown were built for a patterned floor, and where an original parquet survives under the carpet it is worth restoring before anything new is glued. Where a new floor goes down, the Marlow block sits on a plywood deck over levelled joists, and on a Bristol slope the levelling compound decides the result: a block floor shows every dip as a shadow across the pattern.

In a Bedminster or Southville kitchen-diner knocked through to the garden, the blocks run the length of the space over a slab in the extension and a decked timber floor in the old house, with a movement joint where the two structures meet. Over the heated screed at Lockleaze the block is the engineered Oxford construction; a Versailles panel needs a Clifton room broad enough to show whole panels, and few terraces offer that.

Flats are 35% of the homes in the City of Bristol district, and a pattern floor in a flat is a glued floor over a concrete slab, which is the simplest base a parquet can have. The lease is the constraint: where it asks for impact-sound performance, the build-up includes an acoustic layer under the blocks, and that layer has to be one the adhesive is approved for. Ask before ordering.

Terraced houses are 32% of the City of Bristol stock, and a terraced hallway is where a herringbone floor earns its reputation: the pattern leads the eye down a narrow space and makes it read longer. The base is the work. A pattern floor is glued, so the old suspended boards are overlaid with ply, screwed down and levelled; the 90 x 450 mm Oxford blocks suit the proportions of a terrace better than the 125 x 600 mm ones.