All About Colour Variation
Colour Variation Is Naturally Beautiful
Many of our clients ask us about colour variation. It’s important to note that there will always be colour variation with wood flooring.
Using oak as the example, you’ll see colour and grain variation from board to board, and also differences between batches. This is a feature of oak and is to be celebrated; it’s these natural differences that ensure your real wood floor looks as natural as possible. If the colour were too uniform you may end up with a floor that looks less natural and more like laminate or vinyl.
Remember that oak doesn’t discriminate; no matter what type of oak it is, the country of origin or where you buy it from, there will always be a natural colour variation from board to board.
Varying tannin levels and different grain patterns are contributing causes of colour variation – for example, where you have more open grain compared to tighter grain structure, this may also result in some colour variation.
This natural variation is one reason why a small hand sample may look quite different to the installed floor. It’s important to note that small samples are just an indication of the general colour tone and grain pattern effect.
Wood Treatments
Some wood treatments can highlight colour differences – such as with smoked oak. As the smoking process relies on tannin levels in the oak to colour the wood, you will see a range of colours from the tannin variation throughout your flooring. This is a valued feature of smoked oak flooring and helps create a very organic and natural atmosphere.
The process of aging oak can also contribute to colour variation. For example the use of reactive stains will highlight colour differences. You may see a wide range of colours throughout your flooring from a single reactive stain colour – a grey colour may appear light grey and dark grey in the same floor. This variation produces a very attractive and popular aged effect.
Colour Differences From Custom Colours
This is a slightly different topic as we’re not talking so much about variation in colour throughout your floor (although this will still exist), we’re looking at the variation you will see during the process of creating your custom colour.
If you’re getting colour samples produced on different pieces of oak (eg. different board sizes from different manufacturers), you may see substantial colour differences. For example, a tinted oil that appears almost black on Ukrainian oak may appear a mid-brown tone on Lithuanian oak.
Another factor that affects the final colour is texture; a deeper brushed structure on the same piece of oak will typically make the same colour appear darker compared to the same oak with a lightly brushed texture.
How To Obtain Less Colour Variation
One way that you may realise a floor with less variation is to buy a prime grade of oak without knots. In general, the colour variation can be less with this oak grade, however there will still be some variation.
Another way to minimise variation is to buy European made engineered wood flooring. Remember also that just because the oak is ‘European’, it doesn’t mean your floor has been manufactured in Europe. The vast majority of European oak flooring sold in New Zealand is sourced from China.
In general we tend to see more colour variation and less consistency in wood flooring sourced outside of Europe. That’s not to say you can’t get wood flooring with a lot of variation sourced from Europe – you certainly can, but it depends on what treatment the wood has gone through (as mentioned above).
Many European manufacturers offer ranges with more variation as a feature, so there are always exceptions.
The best thing to do is talk to your wood flooring supplier – ask them what is the typical colour variation of the product you’re interested in. Ask to see photos that reflect the average colour variation.
Lastly, embrace the colour variation as this is intrinsic to all wood. Colour and grain variation is one aspect that helps bring a beautiful and natural atmosphere to your interior.
Admonter Oak Seta
Custom Timber Flooring Imports
Special Imports Tailored to Your Living Space
Custom timber imports tailored to your project: Whether you’re after wide‑plank oak, reclaimed timber, or a special colour, we’ll connect you with European mills who can make it happen. You design it—we’ll import and bring it to Aotearoa, ready to lay.
Why Choose Custom Timber Flooring?
When you select a custom wood floor, you get more than just a beautiful surface – you receive a floor that reflects your individuality and enhances the natural aesthetic of your living space. Our special imports allow you to choose from various premium woods, finishes, and textures, ensuring that your new floor complements your design vision.
We collaborate closely with leading manufacturers across Europe, ensuring that every imported timber floor meets the highest quality standards. From European oak to reclaimed wood, our range of bespoke timber floors brings elegance and sophistication to any project.
Crafted for Durability and Longevity
Each of our custom timber flooring imports is chosen for its resilience and longevity. Our flooring products are designed to withstand daily wear while maintaining their natural beauty. Whether you’re renovating a single room or designing an entire home, our tailored flooring solutions provide a timeless foundation for your interior spaces.
Expert Advice and Consultation
Our team is here to guide you through the process of selecting the perfect custom timber floor for your project. We understand that every home is different, which is why we offer personalised advice and detailed consultations. Our objective is to ensure that your flooring choice aligns with your lifestyle, design, and practical needs. Schedule a consultation with a Vienna Woods expert here.
Elevate Your Space with Tailored Timber Imports
Choosing a custom timber floor from Vienna Woods means choosing unmatched quality and personalisation. We invite you to explore our selection of bespoke flooring imports, and discover how we can help turn your design dreams into reality.
Contact us today to discuss your project and request a sample of our imported timber floors.
Vienna Woods // Reclaimed Wagon Oak Herringbone
Vienna Woods // Admonter // Reclaimed Hacked
Using Complementing Woods on Walls, Ceilings and Cabinetry
The use of complementing woods on walls, ceilings and cabinetry is for the individualist who appreciates the beauty intrinsic to wood.
With Admonter’s range of wall cladding and panels, you can easily lift your interior to an inspiring level. You may choose to use either matching wood colours (the same as your Admonter natural wood floorboards), or complementing colours combined with unique textures to encourage an organic, natural ambience.
Panels: Natural wood panels from Admonter let you give full rein to your creativity in all manner of different situations, whether you chose a classic hardwood or reclaimed and aged wood panel, Admonter wood panels have earned a name for themselves.
Cladding: A range of wall elements are available such as Galleria or CUBE. These are interlocking engineered wood panels that work in a similar way to floorboards (installed in a random/brick pattern). This special range of cladding features textures and designs not possible to achieve with floorboards.
Admonter Galleria Reclaimed Wood H2 Hacked
Admonter Cube
Of course you may also use our floorboards on walls and ceilings and many of our clients choose to do so.
Latest Timber Flooring Trends
COLOUR TRENDS / AGED WOOD / TEXTURES / FINISHES
COLOURS
Almost anything goes these days in terms of fashionable wood flooring colours; here are some of the trends we’re seeing on a consistent basis:
Light beige or light brown colours with grey under tones are popular; also mid-brown/grey, especially in smoked oak which brings a unique depth of colour to the flooring. See Imperial Oak, or Empire Oak, for example.
Smoked Oak – Admonter Oak Seta
Colours suitable for a Scandi-inspired interior are still popular; such as off-whites, cream and natural tones without too much yellow. Oak Cashmere is a good example of a neutral ‘Natural’ tone.
Nordic Inspired – Oak Cashmere
Dark and moody flooring has definitely made a strong return. An example of this is Oak Moonlight which is an oiled finish featuring dark hues and an attractive aged appearance. See also, Oak Onyx if you love extra wide boards.
Dark & Moody – Oak Moonlight
Grey tones continue to be popular, as it works exceptionally well with most other decors and provides a sophisticated foundation to your interior. Popular grey colours include Oak Karkula, Oak Constance and Admonter Oak Grey.
Sophisticated Grey – Chateau Oak Constance
AGED WOOD
There are a range of methods used to age the wood; speciality wood stains that react with the tannin to subtly age the wood are very popular. See our Chateau or Raftwood Patina ranges for examples.
Other ways of aging the wood include scraping, planing, smoking, distressing, variable band saw such as the ‘used’ texture, or sourcing reclaimed wood.
Aged ‘Reactive Stain’ oak – Patina Old Barn
Subtle Aged Effect – Planed Oak Oeral
APPEALING TEXTURES
Texture brings an interesting, natural element to the interior.
Lengthwise brushing that subtly highlights the woodgrain will always be popular, however we’re seeing more demand for unique textures such as the ‘Used’ texture, which is a subtle variable bandsaw available in Oak Prairie, Oak Marshall or Oak Whisky.
Variable Bandsaw – Oak Prairie Used Texture
The Authentic texture from Admonter is a real head turner. The wood surface mimics the organic structure of the tree itself. Authentic is available in both oak and larch.
Oak Authentic
Alternatively, reclaimed wood such as Raftwood reclaimed Dutch railway sleeper oak flooring, features a very natural and distinctive texture.
Reclaimed Dutch Railway Sleeper Oak – Raftwod Patina The Brick
EXTRA NATURAL APPEARANCE
Every year we see new releases from our suppliers, in more and more natural finishes. The aim is to provide oil and lacquer finishes so natural that you cannot see any visible finish.
A great example is Oak Natura from Admonter which captures a raw wood optic.
The Admonter Natura finish is available in two options, Oak Natura and Oak Smoke Natura.
Admonter Oak Natura
Another popular, extremely natural looking wood floor is American Oak Pureline from ESTA Parket. This is finished with an invisible Supermatt lacquer.
American Oak Pureline
What Goes First – The Kitchen or the Flooring
Kitchen or flooring first? The short answer.
It depends on the installation method. If your timber floor is being floated, install the kitchen first and run the floor around (and slightly under) the cabinet end panels and kick boards. If the floor is being glued down to the subfloor, install the floor first and sit the kitchen on top.
This is the most common renovation-sequencing question we field at our Newmarket showroom — and it’s the detail most often missed in a build programme. Get it wrong and you’ll see lifting boards, scribed end panels, or extra flooring needed the next time the kitchen layout changes.
| Installation method | Order | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Floating | Kitchen first, then floor | The floor must be free to expand and contract — fixed weight on top can cause boards to lift. |
| Glued down | Floor first, then kitchen | Cleaner finish at the cabinet base, no scribing on site, full coverage if the kitchen ever changes. |
Why does the order matter?
Three things change depending on whether the floor or the cabinets go down first:
- Movement. Engineered timber floors expand and contract with the seasons. A floating floor needs an unbroken expansion gap around the entire perimeter — including under the kitchen cabinets — to move freely.
- Finish quality. Running the floor under the cabinets (glue-down) gives a continuous timber line at the kick board, with no on-site scribing or visible board ends.
- Future flexibility. If the kitchen changes layout in five or ten years, a floor that runs wall-to-wall doesn’t need patching. A floor that stops at the original cabinet footprint usually does.
For most renovations using engineered European oak, we recommend the glue-down approach for these reasons — it’s the spec used in most of our commercial fit-outs and in higher-end residential projects.
Floating installation: install the kitchen first
If you’re floating your timber floor (or installing laminate), install the kitchen cabinets first and lay the floor around them.
A floating floor relies on the boards being free to move as a single sheet. Anything heavy and fixed sitting on top — kitchen cabinetry in particular — anchors that section of the floor and stops it moving with the rest. The result is buckling, gapping, or boards lifting at the joins, especially through the first summer-to-winter cycle.
The standard approach:
- Install the kitchen cabinets onto the bare subfloor, with end panels undercut by the floor thickness plus underlay (typically 16–20mm).
- Run the floating floor up to the cabinet line and slide it under the undercut end panels for a clean finish.
- Leave the kick boards off until the floor is laid, then fit them last so they sit on top of the floor.
- Maintain a 10–12mm expansion gap at all hard edges — walls, columns, doorways — concealed by skirting or scotia.
Free-standing appliances (ovens, dishwashers, fridges) sit on top of the floor — pull-out access stays clean.
Glue-down installation: install the floor first
If your timber floor is being glued directly to the subfloor, we strongly recommend installing the floor first and letting the kitchen cabinets sit on top.
Three reasons:
- Cleaner cabinet base. The cabinet end panels finish on the floor surface, not against it — no on-site scribing, no compromise on the line.
- Full timber coverage. Boards run wall-to-wall. If you change the kitchen layout in future, you’re not patching the floor.
- No expansion conflict. A glued-down floor is bonded to the subfloor and doesn’t need free movement, so kitchen weight on top is irrelevant.
Some builders prefer to install the kitchen first and butt the floor against the cabinet base — usually for programme reasons. It works, but you lose the clean finish and the wall-to-wall coverage. We’d push back on this unless there’s no other option.
Get the subfloor right before either approach
The single biggest cause of failed kitchen flooring installs isn’t the order of work — it’s a subfloor that wasn’t checked properly before the floor went down.
For engineered timber flooring in New Zealand, the working tolerances are:
- Flatness: within 3mm over a 3m straight edge.
- Moisture content: concrete subfloors below 75% RH (BS 8203) or below 4.5% by weight; timber subfloors at 8–14% MC.
- No active rising damp. If you’ve had a leak or a slab pour in the last 90 days, test before specifying.
A subfloor that’s outside tolerance shows up as:
- Hollow or springy spots underfoot, particularly in front of the dishwasher and ovens.
- Boards that creak as you walk past the island.
- Visible unevenness against kitchen joinery, skirtings or door frames.
This is why the installer matters. We’ve seen plenty of beautiful timber compromised by a subfloor nobody checked — and the fix after the fact is always more expensive than the prep would have been.
Renovation sequencing checklist
The right order of operations for most kitchen renovations involving engineered timber flooring:
- Demolition — strip back to the subfloor.
- Plumbing and electrical rough-in — done before anything closes up.
- Subfloor preparation — level, moisture-test, repair where needed.
- Cabinet template / set-out marking on the subfloor.
- Then the order branches:
- Glue-down floor → install the floor, then cabinets on top.
- Floating floor → install the cabinets (end panels undercut), then run the floor around them.
- Skirtings, scotia and kick boards — fitted last in both cases.
- Benchtops, splashbacks, appliances — once the floor and joinery are protected.
Plan the floor delivery to allow at least 5–7 days of acclimatisation on site (in the room it will be installed) before the install date. Engineered European oak ships kiln-dried, but it still needs to settle to the room’s humidity.
What to specify for a kitchen floor
Kitchens are the highest-wear room in most homes — water spills, dropped pots, dragged stools, sun-warmed tile through bifolds, and constant foot traffic. The flooring spec needs to handle all of it.
Three things matter more than the rest:
- Engineered, not solid. An engineered board is dimensionally stable across humidity swings; solid timber is not, and a kitchen has more moisture variation than any other room. More on engineered timber flooring NZ.
- A hardwearing finish. A UV-cured lacquered finish is the most practical for kitchens — it shrugs off spills, doesn’t need re-oiling, and is the easiest to keep clean. See our lacquered finish options.
- Format that suits the layout. Wide planks (180mm+) suit open-plan kitchen-living rooms; herringbone parquet works in smaller, formal kitchens where the pattern becomes part of the design.
Wear layer matters too — anything below 3mm is too thin for a kitchen. We supply a 4mm wear layer as standard across our engineered range, which gives at least one full sand-and-refinish over the life of the floor.
Where the order affects the cost
Sequencing affects the cost of a kitchen flooring install in three ways:
- Extra timber, glue-down + floor first: covers the area under the cabinets too. Adds roughly 2–4m² depending on kitchen size, but you only do it once.
- Cabinet undercutting, floating + kitchen first: the joiner needs to undercut end panels and leave kick boards off until the floor is in. Usually a fixed labour add, $200–$400.
- Subfloor remediation: if it’s not flat or dry, that’s fixed before the floor goes down — typically $30–$80/m² depending on what’s needed.
For full pricing across engineered oak supply, installation methods, and format premiums, see our timber flooring cost guide for NZ.
FAQ — kitchen and flooring sequencing
Should I install timber flooring under kitchen cabinets?
If the floor is glued down, yes — run it wall to wall and let the cabinets sit on top. If it’s floated, no — install the cabinets first and run the floor around them, with end panels undercut to take the floor underneath.
Do I need to install the flooring before the dishwasher?
Yes for both methods. Free-standing appliances (dishwashers, ovens, fridges) sit on top of the finished floor so they can be pulled out for cleaning or replacement without lifting boards.
Will I need to replace the floor if I change the kitchen layout later?
Not if it was glued down — the floor runs underneath, so a new layout fits straight on top. With a floating floor that stopped at the original cabinet line, you’ll need to patch in new boards wherever the new layout extends past the old one. Colour matching after a few years is rarely perfect, so this is a real cost to plan for.
What height should the cabinet kick boards be?
Typically 100–150mm, but more importantly the joiner needs to leave them off until the floor is laid (floating method). Kick boards are then fitted on top of the finished floor so the line runs cleanly across both.
Can the floor and the kitchen joinery be the same colour?
They can, but matching exactly is hard — different timber species, finish chemistry and grain direction read differently. Most designers we work with deliberately contrast the two: a warm engineered oak floor against a painted or stained joinery, or vice versa.
How long should the timber acclimatise before installation?
At least 5–7 days in the room it will be installed, in the boxes, with HVAC running at normal occupancy levels. Engineered European oak is more stable than solid, but it still needs to settle to the site’s humidity before it’s nailed or glued in place.
Plan your kitchen flooring with us
We supply and install engineered European oak across Auckland. If you’re sequencing a kitchen renovation and want to get the order right, the install method right, and the spec right — talk to us.
- Request samples and a written quote — see and feel the boards before you specify, with a quote inside two business days.
- Book a Newmarket showroom consultation — bring your plans, we’ll work through the install method and the floor spec with you.