Recommendation From Family For Oak Flooring

Anastasia (Anna) Deberry initially contacted Oak By Design in 2018 when, together with husband Marco, they were planning the renovation and extension of their former farmhouse in the North East.

A few years previously, Marco’s sister, Georgina, had used Oak By Design for the trusses, purlins, doors and flooring for their own conversion nearby (To see their Case study - click here ).

She recommended that Anna and Marco contact them for their engineered oak flooring.

They were using an experienced project manager, a family friend, to oversee the building works but they were also very hands on with sourcing the materials they required for their home.

As a large family home with stables and lots of fields, the flooring was going to have to contend with a lot of activity from adults, children and dogs! At the front of the property the kitchen bi-fold doors would open out onto the patio. The oak flooring needed to be able to cope with outdoor shoes!

The room designs throughout the house were to have grey running throughout, so Anna wanted flooring with a grey accent to seamlessly link the rooms and floors together. She still wanted the natural oak to show through and highlight the oaks character.

Anna paid a visit to the Oak by Design showroom and took a number of engineered oak flooring hand samples back home with her. Unfortunately, when she saw them in her own house, they looked too pastel-like for their home and colours.

Joanne then arranged for some of their larger samples boards in Smoked Natural, Natural White and Stone Grey to be sent, via a local courier, up to Anna.

The Natural White has, as its name suggests, a more white overall colour, the Smoked Natural is a rich, medium oak and the Stone Grey has grey overtones. Seeing the 3 large boards together did the trick.

Anna and Marco saw straight away that the Stone Grey was the colour for them.

Requiring 340 square metres of engineered oak flooring, they needed to be sure they were completely happy as this would run throughout the whole house (apart from bathrooms and en-suites). They decided on the Chateau board (a smooth, sanded finish) at 190mm wide board and 20mm thick. They needed to have a board suitable for Under-floor heating (UFH) and the Esco oak flooring is.

To keep the cohesion of the flooring, 160 metres of matching skirting boards were also ordered to keep the fluidity of the colour.

The house has many very tall windows where the lower edge sits just above the skirting, so they also decided on the double bullnose window cills.

All the products Esco provide are factory finished and have an extremely hardwearing finish and are made to match any of their flooring.

There was one problem though! The kitchen area would have 4 structural circular, concrete pillars that Anna and Marco wanted to highlight rather than cover. They were unsure, though, as how to finish them where the floor met them. They asked Oak By Design if they could come up with a solution.

They agreed to manufacture 4 circular skirting boards. Each one made from kiln dried oak and made up of a number of ‘rows’ of 2 semi circular pieces at 120mm high with an internal diameter of 170mm. These could be ‘wrapped around’ the base of the columns to create a skirting board to match the others. 3 coats of matching oil supplied by Esco would finish these and 6 bespoke thresholds.

A photo of the circular skirting board can be seen on the photo's at the bottom.