Starting with custom wood flooring
Whether specifying a decorative border around a kitchen island, a parquet floor in the foyer, or a custom-designed medallion in the dining room, wood floor inlays are a personal and enduring design element inside and out. Here, a manufacturer imparts technical information and the particulars of custom wood flooring specifications.
History
The custom wood floors that most of us are familiar with exist in Europe, where they decorate the French Chateau, Royal Palaces, and Italian villas in Tuscany. Art Deco, Art Nouveau, and the various Revival styles have adopted marquetry and parquetry in public architecture and private homes. Ornamental floors with distinctive designs are now more popular than ever.
Hermitage Palace wood floor inlay from the mid-1700s.
Construction of the floors
Custom wood floors are made by cutting the pieces of various domestic and exotic woods and assembling them into intricate designs. The wood can be cut using powerful laser machines or CNC routers. The laser leaves a black "burn" line at the seams. For this reason, Czar Floors uses computerized Routers to cut individual details. This allows for a tight fit in the final product. Inlays are pre-assembled and ready for glue-down installation. The woods in the inlays are not stained - the colors are all natural wood tones. Compared to the "floor surface painted" designs - the inlays are not destroyed if the floors are refinished.
Every piece of the wood medallion is precisely cut and hand-assembled into the final product.
Design Elements
There are several design elements that can be used in the decorative hardwood flooring.
- APRON - Wood flooring outside the border. Also called frame or skirting. Often, this area is filled with regular wood plank flooring . Plank can be laid parallel or 90 degrees to the walls. Typically, the borders would be installed about 12" off the wall, leaving space for the apron. This is done so that the border is not hidden from view and that adjustments can be made to provide equal-width aprons for ends and sides.
- BORDER - Usually, a flooring pattern surrounds a room or at a transition area outside the field. Borders can define a specific area or create a decorative threshold between the rooms. Ornamental borders can follow a room's perimeter or the hearth of a fireplace. They can mirror the shape of a chandelier in a foyer or surrounding a dining room table. Borders are typically produced in about three feet solid sections with repeating patterns. Check the Czar Floors' Borders Selection..
- CORNER BLOCK or BORDER CORNER - A border element designed to complement the border pattern, interrupting the flow of the pattern at the corners, usually at turns. A typical corner block is a square piece installed where the border must turn 90 deg. Czar Floors can produce custom border corners with other angles. Some models do not require the corner blocks if the boards can be mitered 45 deg. in the intersection.
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FIELD - The main area of the floor inside the border. Field can made with the regular plank floor, Herringbone pattern, or parquet. (
Check the Herringbone options
).Plank and herringbone can be installed diagonally to add a visual dimension to the field. Parquet floors are the wood pieces pre-assembled as tiles, ready for the glue-down installation. From the classic Fontainebleau pattern to the futuristic 3-D cube design, the variations of the parquet can be infinite by changing the wood species, sizes, and type of installation.
Check the Czar Floors' Parquet Selection -
MEDALLION/INLAY - A pattern located at a focal point of the floor. A medallion is an inlay in round, oval, square, etc shapes that can be installed as a focal point in the middle of the room. Medallions are available in various sizes like 30", 40", 48", etc. (Czar Floors designed and installed a 45 ft. diameter medallion, the largest in the world). They can be retrofitted in the existing floor or installed as a part of new flooring.
Czar Floors can match the thickness and finish of a medallion to the surrounding floor.
To pick the size of the medallion - take the smaller size of the room. Choose the medallion about 1/3 of that size if you use the border. Use between 1/3 and 1/2 of this distance if there is no border. A narrow, elongated room may look better with the oval medallion.
Check the Czar Floors' Medallions Selection.
Definitions as shown on the diagram:
Stock vs. Custom Designs
The manufacturers may offer ready-made or made-to-order wood floor designs. Generally speaking, "What you see is what you'll get." Floor designers can coordinate colors, patterns, and sizes with other surface elements. This is a more expedient approach.
However, a unique and personal result awaits the client or design professional ready for deeper involvement. Engaging a flooring artist's talent can develop a design that incorporates the client's ideas. This is a lengthier process that produces a greater reward.
Visiting Czar Floors’ Gallery will help to prepare for the plunge into the specification process, in which design, materials, costs and schedules must be sorted out. Architects and designers may be interested to check the architectural drawings that were prepared by Czar Floors for the previous projects.
Our designers can help plan the entire house's flooring. Color rendering of the floor plan will help to visualize the design.
If planning a custom design, it’s easy to carry out this process by exchanging images and ideas via e-mail. Once the general parameters and budget have been established, the wood floor designers will create preliminary sketches for discussion, possible revision and final working drawings. Read more about custom design..
Budget: Calculation of a project budget entails a complete analysis of factors that are listed here:
- Size (discounting possible economies of scale);
- The complexity of design (detail of imagery, size of elements);
- Cost of selected materials;
- Delivery, and installation costs and complexity; and
- Schedule (rushing incurs increased expenses).
The flooring manufacturer will often compute direct costs and estimated labor time for one figure, then compare it to a price-per-square-foot calculation that has been done on comparable projects.
Design Considerations
To make the selection process easier, determine the overall style of the interior — rustic, contemporary, or traditional, for example. At this point, certain flooring design elements that typically do not lend themselves to that particular interior style should be eliminated.
It is common to use the natural colors of various media rather than relying on stains to impart color. Check the wood selection. If the existing color of the wood is used, the whole floor can be sanded at once and then finished with a clear finish. It is more complicated to stain the field with a dark stain and the border with a natural stain, and it also may create a dilemma the next time the floor is sanded.
The field pattern must also be complementary to the room. Most border designs work very well with plank or parquet. However, care must be taken not to border a relatively complex parquet pattern with an equally or more complicated design. The border defines the field, so it should contrast to some extent. A complicated border calls for a less intricate field, and vice versa.
The field dimensions should work out so that the outside edges of the field and apron finish with half or whole repetitions of the pattern. Finishing with partial pieces would not be pleasing to the eye.
Other floor definitions
- CUTTING ALLOWANCE - When estimating the amount of flooring to be ordered, the extra amount is needed to allow installers to make cuts. Typical waste is around 10%. For the diagonal parquet installation or for odd-shaped rooms, 15% is added. You may use our floor calculator to estimate the materials.
- PLAINSAWN - Lumber in which the annual growth rings make an angle of less than 45 degrees with thethe piece's surfacee. This exposes the springwood and summerwood of the annual growth ring to produce a pronounced grain pattern.
- QUARTERSAWN - Lumber in which the annual growth rings of wood form an angle of 45 to 90 degrees with the piece's surface. The medullary rays in ring porous woods are exposed in quartersawn boards as flecks that produce a distinctive grain pattern. Typically more expensive than Plainsawn. Recommended for the radiant heated floors due to better dimensional stability.
- FILLETS - The small pieces used to form fingerblock parquet patterns. They are also called fingers or slats.
