The CAB Residences, Auckland
The CAB Residences is a heritage apartment conversion in Auckland’s CBD, inside the former Civic Administration Building on Greys Avenue. Vienna Woods supplied and hand-laid wide long-plank Admonter European oak across the apartments, a mid-tone floor picked to run quiet and continuous through the whole building.
A defining floor for a landmark building
Love and Co (John Love) took the former Civic Administration Building on Greys Avenue, completed in 1966 above Aotea Square, and turned it into apartments. Interior design was Josephine Design (Josephine Love). The floor was one of the defining materials, so it had to do two jobs: feel unmistakably premium in every apartment, and read as one calm, consistent surface across the whole conversion.
That ruled out most of the market. A build at this scale, fitted out apartment by apartment, needs boards that match batch to batch and hold their colour and figure the whole way through.
Admonter European oak, mid-tone, wide long plank
The specified floor was Admonter European oak from the Admonter collection, a named Austrian range Vienna Woods represents. It is made in Austria from European oak, with technical documentation on file. For a landmark conversion under design and council scrutiny, a certified, traceable range takes the paperwork off the critical path.
The look was a mid-tone, wide long plank in an engineered European oak board, soft-bevelled so the floor reads as a continuous surface rather than a run of separate planks. Admonter is a special-order range, so board selection was locked in early and delivered to suit the fit-out programme.
One floor, every apartment
Because the range holds its colour and figure across batches, apartments completing in waves still landed on the same floor. Engineered construction was the sensible call over the building’s original concrete slabs, which is the usual choice for apartment and heritage-conversion work of this kind. The result is a set of interiors that photograph the way the design renders promised and feel the same underfoot from one apartment to the next.
Wide long plank, hand-laid
Wide long plank was the point. In rooms with real length, long boards let the grain run unbroken across the space instead of chopping it into short lengths. The Vienna Woods team hand-laid the floor and staged the install to match Love and Co’s programme, protecting each finished apartment through the trades that followed. It is the kind of floor you notice without knowing why: continuous, quiet, and the same in every room.
Specifying oak for a commercial or heritage fit-out?
See the CAB’s mid-tone European oak in your own space. Order the colour as a free sample, then talk to us about supply and installation for your project.
