Parquet Flooring in Nottingham

A block floor is at home in two very different Nottingham rooms. The first is the Victorian reception room in The Park or Mapperley Park, where a Marlow block in basketweave or brick bond goes on a plywood deck over levelled joists and where an original parquet, if it survives, is restored before anything new is glued. The second is the inter-war semi in Wollaton or Beeston, where the slab is ground flat, the damp-proof membrane is checked, and the blocks are glued straight down.

The waterside schemes are the third case: Trent Basin, Pelham Waterside and The Yacht Club Riverside are heated screed, and there the block is the engineered Oxford construction because a solid block gaps over a heat source. A Versailles panel is a large square and wants a Park villa or a Wollaton Park house to show several whole panels; in a Sherwood terrace front room the square cannot repeat. A patterned floor is ordered with its cutting waste allowed for.

Semi-detached houses are 33% of the homes in Nottingham, and the semi's knocked-through living room is the room most often floored in herringbone across Nottingham: 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 27% of the Nottingham 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.