Parquet Flooring in Oxford

A Jericho terrace room is small, and a long diagonal pattern loses its geometry there before it repeats, so the bonds that suit Oxford are the quieter ones: a Marlow block in basketweave or brick bond on a plywood deck over levelled joists, where the short block rides the irregularities an old joist has developed. A North Oxford villa reception room takes the broader Oxford block, and where an original parquet survives in the conservation area it is restored first.

The preparation is more forgiving under blocks than under wide boards, but the deck is still checked with a straight edge, because a pattern shows a dip that a plank would hide. At Blackbird Leys the screed is heated and the block is the engineered Oxford construction. A Versailles panel wants a North Oxford drawing room broad enough to show whole panels, and the order allows for the cutting waste a pattern creates.

Semi-detached houses are 32% of the homes in Oxford, and the semi's knocked-through living room is the room most often floored in herringbone across Oxford: 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.

Flats are 31% of the homes in the Oxford 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.