Parquet Flooring in Reading

A Reading parquet floor goes into a Caversham or Eldon Square reception room on a plywood deck over levelled joists, and the levelling is done with more care than for a plank floor, because a block floor telegraphs a dip in the joists that a single-direction plank would absorb. Where an original parquet survives inside the St Peter’s or Kendrick conservation areas, restoring it is the first option.

The Marlow block is the solid version for a house on a dry void; the engineered Oxford block is the version for the heated screed at Dee Park and the Kennet Island flats, where a solid block would gap over the heat. A Versailles panel needs a room broad enough to show whole panels, a Caversham Heights house rather than a Victorian terrace front room. The order carries the cutting waste a pattern creates.

Flats are 33% of the homes in the Reading 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.

Terraced houses are 28% of the Reading 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.