Raftwood: textured oak flooring with a history
Cleft, split and hand-filled European oak, made to order for New Zealand homes.
Raftwood is the heavily textured oak in Vienna Woods' European-made Flamingo range. Every board is European oak with open splits, cleft grain and hand-filled knots, finished in natural oil. It began as reclaimed railway-sleeper oak, and it still carries that rugged, lived-in character today.
From railway sleepers to your floor
Raftwood began as reclaimed oak railway sleepers from the Eastern Bloc, some of them more than a century old. Those sleepers are long gone now, but the product lives on. Today it is European oak, worked in Dutch and German workshops by the same artisans, using the same hand techniques that show off every split, knot and dent.
It sits in the Flamingo range, a Dutch collection Vienna Woods represents directly in New Zealand. It comes in made to order, arriving only a few times a year, so no two runs look quite the same.
Character you can feel underfoot
The surface is the point. Open splits, a cleft face and hand-filled knots give Raftwood a rugged, tactile texture that flat, modern floors just don't have. The natural oil finish sits into the grain rather than over it, so the timber reads as timber.
Colours run from lighter, warmer tones like Amazone through to the deep, dark Yellowstone and Canadian. Order the tones you are weighing up as free timber flooring samples and see them in your own light before you commit.
Specs and specifying
The board
What you are laying
- 220mm wide plank, our standard Raftwood format
- 15mm engineered European oak, 3mm oak top layer that varies up to 4mm with natural undulations and splits
- Natural oil finish
- Tongue and groove over a birch multiply core
- Also profiles, widths and lengths to order, plus herringbone and chevron parquet
Specifying it
Detailing a job
- Matching stair nosings for a continuous run through the home
- Tested for wet areas, with the paperwork to prove it. Raftwood was independently tested in New Zealand by an IANZ-accredited laboratory and passed at the top grade: no water reached the substrate in 24 hours. We hold the test report and our own E3/AS1 Alternative Solution documentation, which is the pack a building consent authority needs to sign off a timber floor in a kitchen or a laundry. Installed to the documented detail: PVA in the joints, perimeter sealant, and D3 PVA in the T&G within 1.5 m of any sanitary fixture.
- Made to order, with roughly four to five runs a year, so plan lead time into the build
An oiled floor is easy to keep
The oil finish is forgiving. Everyday marks tend to sit into the character rather than stand out against it, and worn patches can be spot-repaired in place instead of sanding the whole floor. See how to care for an oiled timber floor.
Free samples
Hold the real texture and see the colour in your own space before you order a floor.
The Flamingo range
See Raftwood and the rest of our Dutch, European oak collection in one place.
Engineered oak, explained
How an engineered board is built, and why it suits New Zealand homes.
Bring home the texture of Raftwood
Order a sample to feel the split and cleft grain for yourself, or talk to us about lead times and a price for your floor.
