Bordeaux Herringbone in a Westmere Home
Petit Château Bordeaux Herringbone, laid across the open-plan ground floor of a Westmere new build in Auckland. Worth writing up because the buyer works in the timber trade, so he read every board before he committed. He’d spent months hunting for prime-grade herringbone that measured up. Most of what he found in New Zealand fell short. This is the floor that didn’t.
Prime grade, no surprises
He wanted one thing, done properly: a herringbone floor that reads as quiet and continuous across a large open plan. Minimal knots, no splits, no character flecks pulling the eye sideways every third board. Prime grade in the real sense, tight and calm and consistent, behaving like a single surface rather than a run of separate pieces. Colour warm enough to feel domestic without tipping into orange or yellow.
He’d looked widely. Most suppliers either couldn’t deliver that grading, or could on paper but not in the pack. That gap, between what’s specified and what turns up on install day, is where a floor loses anyone who actually knows timber.
Why Bordeaux delivered
Bordeaux is European oak, engineered overseas to Vienna Woods’ specification and built to be sanded and refinished later. The boards arrive site-ready with a factory finish, so they look on install day much the way they looked in the showroom.
Grading is where the Petit Château range earns its place. It sits at the value-conscious end of our pricing, but the prime selection is genuinely prime: boards chosen for cleanliness, not just labelled that way. For a floor that needs to be as close to knot-free as a natural product honestly gets, that’s the whole point. The chevrons do the talking and the timber stops interrupting.
The tone carries the rest. A mid-warm European oak, neither bleached nor smoked, it holds under natural light and warm interior lighting alike. In a home built around a vaulted, light-filled living space, that neutrality was exactly what the room wanted.
A floor that reads as one surface
Laid through the entry, kitchen, dining and living, the herringbone runs uninterrupted across the ground floor. Because the grading is so even, the eye doesn’t snag on single boards. It follows the pattern instead: the long diagonal pull of the chevrons across the open plan, tightening into the kitchen and softening again where it meets the joinery.
It sits well against the rest of the palette. Pale stone in the kitchen, dark steel on the fireplace, leather on the sofa. Clean prime grade lets the timber be a backdrop with depth rather than a feature laid flat, which is what a home built on a few well-judged moves needs underfoot.
Selling timber to someone who knows timber
There’s a particular pressure in selling timber to someone who works in timber. They know the difference between a hand-picked sample and a board pulled at random on install day. They spot a ‘prime’ floor still hiding knot clusters in the shadow lines. That scrutiny is welcome. It’s the standard the Petit Château range was built to meet, and on this floor the grading delivered in the pack, not just on the sample.
See the Petit Château collection
Bordeaux is one of seven colours in the range, each available in herringbone and plank formats.
Order Bordeaux as a sample
Lay a board on your own floor, in your own light, and read the grading before you commit.
Talk through your project
Tell us about the space and we will help you specify the right floor for it.
Bring this floor into your home
Searching for prime-grade herringbone and hitting the same gap he did? We will send samples so you can lay a board on your own floor, in your own light, first.
