Solid Wood Flooring in Cambridge

The Victorian villas of Newnham and De Freville, and the Edwardian houses off Hills Road, are the Cambridge homes a solid Windsor board suits: suspended timber over a ventilated void, room heights that carry a plank, and owners who keep a house long enough to sand its floor twice. Where the house is inside the De Freville or Newnham Croft conservation area and the original boards survive, restoring them is the solid-wood job.

A third of the city rents privately, colleges and the science parks behind much of it, and a let is not a solid board’s home; nor is the heated screed at Eddington and Darwin Green, where a solid board is the wrong construction, nor the slab of an Arbury or King’s Hedges house. The engineered range takes all three, being listed as compatible with the heating, and the solid range stays for the houses that can carry it.

Flats are 35% of the homes in the Cambridge district, and a flat is usually the wrong place for a solid board: the base is often concrete, the lease usually has an impact-sound clause, and a solid floor cannot be floated on an acoustic underlay. In a converted house with a timber floor and no clause, it can work; in a purpose-built block, an engineered board over acoustic underlay is the right answer and the wood looks the same.

Terraced houses are 28% of the homes in the Cambridge district, and a terrace is where solid oak is at home: the original floor was solid timber on joists, and a new solid board is fixed the same way, nailed or screwed through the tongue into the joists or a ply overlay. The 90 mm Windsor Narrow boards suit the proportions of a terraced front room. What the terrace needs first is a dry, ventilated void underneath, because solid timber follows the moisture of the air around it.