A popular request for wood floor restoration, as well as an interesting challenge for experts in wood floor maintenance, is parquet flooring.
Whilst it could be most simply summarised as a type of wooden mosaic, parquet has an interesting flooring tradition itself, as well as experiencing a fascinating metamorphosis from a necessarily painstaking installation to something that can be conveniently installed using premade tiles.
This transition towards practicality is rather fitting, as the very reason why it was invented and developed in the first place was as a practical solution in a building that was otherwise entirely impractical.
The Palace of Versailles was initially constructed on wooded wetlands, becoming a rather infamous example of the single-minded force of will that defined French royalty. Nothing would stop the palace from being constructed to the exacting demands of King Louis XIV, not even practicality or reality.
Ultimately, at significant expense, the wet woodlands became a grand sprawling palace and one of the finest gardens in the world at the time, but there were constant problems living there,
one of which was the flooring.
Initially, Versailles had marble flooring, which was as grand, opulent and ridiculously impractical as the rest of the palace, but it quickly caused some serious problems having it in place.
The marble required constant washing and cleaning, which was beginning to rot the thick joists needed to keep the heavy stone in place on the upper floors. There were serious concerns that parts of the Palace might collapse entirely.
The solution was to create an ornate set of diagonal square tiles that had an exceptionally unique and striking look but needed far less day-to-day maintenance and were much lighter and therefore put less stress on the palace’s structure.
They can be seen in many of the rooms of the palace, most notably the War Room and Hall of Mirrors.
Whilst the effect was achieved by placing pieces in one at a time, it precluded the development of parquet tiles that are now more common.