Parquet Flooring in Leeds

The Victorian villas of Roundhay and the Edwardian houses of Chapel Allerton have the wide reception rooms a block floor needs, and in both areas the conservation designation means an original parquet, where it survives, is worth restoring before it is replaced. Where a new floor goes down, the solid Marlow block is glued to a plywood deck over levelled joists; the base must be flat before the first block, because a block floor shows every dip as a shadow.

In the Aire Park and Whitehall Riverside flats the screed carries heating and the block is the engineered Oxford construction. A Versailles panel needs a room broad enough to show whole panels, which in Leeds means a Roundhay drawing room rather than a converted flat. Order for the cutting waste a patterned floor creates, and let the blocks sit in the room for a few days before laying.

Semi-detached houses are 38% of the homes in Leeds, and the semi's knocked-through living room is the room most often floored in herringbone across Leeds: a pattern floor gives a long room a centre. Set out from the middle of the room, not from a wall, and where the room crosses from timber onto the concrete of an extension the two bases are levelled to each other first, because a glued pattern shows every step in the base.

Social renting is 20% of households in Leeds; pattern floors are rare in that stock because they are glued and fitted to the room, and a refurbishment programme prefers a floor it can lay quickly across many units. Where a provider wants the look without the glue-down, the herringbone rigid-vinyl range is the specification that gets written.