Parquet Flooring in Leicester

Parquet suits the Leicester rooms that were built with high ceilings and a fireplace in mind, the Stoneygate villas and the Clarendon Park terraces, where a Marlow block in basketweave or brick bond goes on a plywood deck over levelled joists. Where the house is inside the Stoneygate or New Walk conservation area and an original parquet is under the carpet, the block floor to order is the one that restores it.

The estates further out give a block floor a different base: a slab in Braunstone or Beaumont Leys, ground flat and checked for its membrane, then the blocks glued straight to it. At Ashton Green and the Waterside the screed is heated and the block is the engineered Oxford construction. A Versailles panel needs a room broad enough for whole panels, an Oadby house rather than a terrace front room. The order allows for the pattern’s cutting waste.

Semi-detached houses are 36% of the homes in Leicester, and the semi's knocked-through living room is the room most often floored in herringbone across Leicester: 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.

Terraced houses are 29% of the Leicester 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.