HW2902 Mende Prime 190mm Engineered Oak Wood Flooring

This board uses prime grade timber, which is the cleanest of all the grades. There will be few, if any, knots and they will be of minimal size. There will also be minimal sapwood and relatively little colour variation.

If you prefer a board with more visual variation then refine your search to look for a character, natural or rustic grade board.

In general, European mills utilise a technique known as live sawing. This results in a mixture of plain, quarter and rift sawn cuts all in one wide plank of wood. Capturing all parts of the wood in one cut like this gives the floor a unique and notably beautiful appearance, and because at least a third of the cut is quarter sawn, the planks themselves are particularly stable.

In an engineered board, the top layer is, of course, solid wood, whilst the other layers may be plywood, softwood or yet more layers of hardwood. Each layer is bonded to the next with the grain running at right angles, which makes it virtually impossible for the board to swell or shrink. So when it is laid it is highly unlikely to warp and gap, or otherwise suffer in the same way as solid wood flooring can when exposed to changes in humidity through the use of heating and air conditioning, or simply due to a change in the weather.

In addition to being far more stable, engineered wood offers several other benefits. It may be laid as a floating floor, as well as being nailed or glued down, and some planks even come in an easy to fit 'click' system. It is usually pre-finished, meaning you see exactly how your floor will look before it is fitted and ensuring a faster, easier installation with no mess and no fuss. And, because it isn't affected by changes in humidity, it is available in much wider, longer, more imposing planks. Finally, it is particularly kind to the environment, because every beautiful, stable, hard wearing engineered timber floor fitted uses less of the slow-growth hardwoods. Little wonder that engineered timber is now by far the most popular type of timber flooring fitted around the world.