Timber Flooring NZ: Engineered European Oak

A solid board is milled from a single piece of timber through its full thickness. Wood moves across the grain as it takes up and gives off moisture, and a solid board has nothing inside it restraining that movement, so it swells through a damp winter and shrinks back after a summer of heat pumps and dry indoor air. That is why solid floors need generous expansion allowance at the perimeter, and time on site to acclimatise before they go down. The payoff is thickness. There is plenty of timber above the tongue, so a solid floor can be sanded back and recoated many times over its life.

An engineered board is a genuine hardwood wear layer bonded over a core of layers laid at right angles. Ours is European oak, engineered to our specification overseas. Those cross layers pull against each other and restrain how far the board can move across its width when the humidity changes. That stability is why engineered is the usual specification over a concrete slab, over underfloor heating, and in commercial timber flooring, where the building is heated and cooled year round. Underfloor heating should be run so the floor surface stays below 27 °C.

The wear layer is real timber, so an engineered floor can still be sanded back and recoated. It has less to give than a solid board, so wear-layer depth is the figure worth asking any supplier about. Ours is 4 mm on Petit Château.

Oak takes stain and oil predictably, and the grain reads well at plank width. That is why it is the default hardwood in European joinery. One caution if you are building in stages: ranges do get retired, so ask us to check a colour is still current before you commit to it, rather than after.

Format is the other half of the decision. Wide-plank shows the grain and suits open living. Herringbone reads as pattern more than timber and pulls a room together. Chevron does the same with a longer, sharper line. All three are cut from the same European oak, so the choice in front of you is pattern, not species.

Two boards off the same tree can be priced a long way apart. Grade is what does it: how much knot, sap and colour variation a board is allowed to carry, and how long the individual pieces run. A clean, long-length board costs more to select and more to make than a rustic one. Neither is better. They look different, and that is the whole decision.

What timber flooring costs in New Zealand depends mostly on format and grade; ours runs from $99 per square metre incl GST, with most of the range under $320, supply only. Underlay, adhesive, subfloor preparation and labour sit on top of that, and on most jobs they are not a small addition. Use the flooring calculator to get the square metres, then allow cutting waste on top, more for herringbone and chevron than for straight plank.

We stock engineered, deliberately. Timber flooring in New Zealand has to cope with houses that run damp through winter and dry once the heating goes on, and most new build is slab-on-ground. Solid still makes sense if you are matching existing boards in a villa restoration, or laying direct to joists over a ventilated subfloor for maximum sanding life. We supply solid on special order only, so talk to us before you plan that one.

Start with the collections, narrow it to two or three, then order those as samples and put them on the floor of the room they are going in. Boards look different under an Auckland skylight than they do under a showroom light.