How to Create Parquet Flooring in Bold, Bright Colors

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Perhaps in recent years you have heard chatter of a parquet comeback. But what if it’s not in the way that you expected it to? What if it’s much more fun?

Parquet is created by taking small slats of wood and arranging them in a distinct repeated pattern. Lauded for being the only type of solid wood flooring as easy to install as tile, each piece contributes to a greater concerted pattern that ultimately defines the geometry of an entire floor. Whether it’s in your aunt’s mid-century living room or in a grand European château, you’ve seen it many times before. Even in its typical yellow and brown hues, it is highly visual. So, what happens when it is injected with pigment? And we’re not referring to gentle tints; we’re talking bold, bright and unabashed color.

Humblegården’s living room features an in-wall fireplace, which is surrounded by red and black–stained parquet.

Described as an “oversized and multicolored parquet,” Tham & Videgård’s Humblegården celebrates vibrant psychedelic colors and the artful potential of parquet flooring. Tham & Videgård were driven to depart from the traditional Swedish interior colors and patterns developed by artists and architects like Carl Larsson and Josef Frank and, instead, draw inspiration from the seasonal shifts of the nearby Humblegården park — a famous park in the center of Stockholm. “From winter gray and black, to bright and deep green in summer, to orange, red and yellow during autumn,” they incorporated every color of the rainbow, leaving no corner left behind in the process.

Humblegården’s interior via Tham & Videgård

Using stained ash flooring, the architects formed a unified system throughout all eleven rooms of the home. They produced an endless array of shades in order to precisely illustrate the many moods and programmatic uses of the home, creating seamless transitions from one room to another. Thoroughly intentional, the parquet that surrounds the fireplace takes on black and red shades, acknowledging the colors of burning flame that heats the surrounding space.

Bird’s-eye view of Humblegården’s multicolored floor plan

Humblegården is a true exhibition of craftsmanship. With its creation, Tham & Videgård discovered a novel way of detailing architecture that combined age-old industrial processes with modern highly technical materials. Beyond materiality, the position of every piece was rigorously specified, completely eliminating random placement from the construction process. And while Humblegården is wholly unique, Tham & Videgård are not the only ones toying with the colored possibilities of parquet.

Challenging as it may be, individuals are searching for authentic wood flooring that achieves a range of color intensity without camouflaging the natural grains, knots and essential imperfections of wood. For a decade, Yael Mer and Shay Alkalay — the duo behind Raw Edges Design Studio — have explored the parallels between flooring and textiles. Drawing inspiration from the woven nature of a rug, they have installed oiled oak herringbone parquet flooring at Frieze Art Fair 2009 for Established & Sons and 40 of Stella McCartney’s international retail stores, all in partnership with London-based architects APA.

Left: herringbone weave created with 15 different colors for Established & Sons, image via Raw Edges Design Studio; right: parquet staircase commissioned by Stella McCartney for a retail store, image via Raw Edges Design Studio

To create their work, Mer and Alkalay use off-the-shelf parquet and hand-dye each piece, engaging in a delicate process that closely resembles a wacky science-fair experiment. Like Humblegården, they select a set of distinct colors and, with their perpetual repetition, render a greater highly mathematical whole, ultimately seeking to add visual quality to the wood without taking anything away from it. Both remarkably beautiful and outstandingly creative, their work has evolved into an established brand, which draws attention from all over the world.

Left: interior floor plan consisting of 5,644 parquet blocks, image via Raw Edges Design Studio; right: hand-dyed pieces of off-the-shelf parquet, image via Raw Edges Design Studio

Both Tham & Videgård and Raw Edges Design Studio honed colored parquet to create highly individualized patterns and compositions. And while their practices are not for every space — especially tiny dark ones — their work offers essential learnings in how to experiment with vibrantly stained wood without hiding its natural grain. With precedents like these, perhaps a parquet comeback could feel less like a mid-century revival and more like a completely fresh contender in specifying brilliant, natural wood interiors.

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