Parquet Flooring in London

Parquet in London is a repair as often as a purchase. Behind the carpet in a Victorian reception room there is sometimes an original block floor, and in a conservation area that floor has a claim to stay. Where it has gone, or where the room is a warehouse conversion in Clerkenwell or a mansion flat in Marylebone, the choice is between a solid Marlow block glued to a flat base and an engineered Oxford block that can go over underfloor heating.

The base decides the pattern more than taste does. Blocks want a flat, rigid surface: plywood over levelled joists in a terrace, a checked slab in a post-war block, and in a leasehold flat the acoustic layer sits underneath the plywood, not on top of it. A Versailles panel needs a room broad enough to show at least a few full panels, which in London usually means the piano nobile of a townhouse rather than a converted flat.

Flats are 54% of the homes in the London (33 boroughs) 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.

Private renting is 30% of households in London (33 boroughs), and parquet in a rented home is a decision about the void between tenancies: a glued pattern floor is not lifted and relaid, it is refinished in place, which a 3 mm wear layer allows. In London it is chosen for the flats and houses that let at the upper end, where the floor is part of the rent.