Article, November 9, 2023

Family living is made easy with real wood flooring

A clever combination of materials, including beautiful, engineered wood flooring from The Natural Wood Floor Co, perfectly blends old with new for a modern kitchen extension to a Victorian, semi-detached property.

With the owners looking to extend to ensure their home remains comfortable as their children grow older, the ideawas to create one large kitchen living space on the ground floor, to encourage socializing. Extending out to the rear of the property creates a larger kitchen and the entire space benefits from more natural light.

Overseeing the redevelopment was the team at Anna Richmond Design, tasked with creating a modern, homely space that was perfect for cooking, dining, and relaxing as a family. The challenge was in ensuring that the new extension blended in with the traditional style of the property overall, helping retain its mid-century feel. A handleless kitchen complete with Farrow & Ball paint and stone worktops is matched with oak aged parquet flooring, that not only looks the part but is also very forgiving and extremely easy to maintain, something is essential in such a hard-working and busy family living environment.

Oak aged parquet throughout the new extension connects the new building with the period house and provides the perfect backdrop for the clients’ collection of mid-century furniture.

As much as the new extension housed the kitchen, it also had to be a living space and therefore clean and bright. The rear glass doors that lead out to the garden are an important feature, while the parquet floor sets the tone for the interior space, tying in the modern elements with the original Victorian features of the house.

Parquet blocks have been back in fashion for a while, but they couldn’t be hotter right now. The combination of colour, wood detailing and pattern make this a real statement floor. For an up-to-date look go large with 600 mm sized blocks. Alternatively, aged designs are great for adding extra character as they look like reclaimed blocks but can be used with underfloor heating.

In such a large kitchen living space we used a blend of materials that are tactile to create warmth and character even when the look is contemporary, and this is where the parquet floor works particularly well. It combines brilliantly with the semi-matt finish on the kitchen furniture, contrasting with marble stone worktops and bronze touches, all coming together to allow the newly created space to sit unobtrusively within its surroundings.