Engineered wood: Keep the timber. Lose the movement

Real wood moves. That is not a fault, it is what timber does. It takes up moisture in a humid month and gives it back in a dry one, and a solid board is a slightly different width in August than it is in January.

Engineered wood exists to keep the timber and lose the movement.

The top is real wood. Not a print, not a photograph of oak under a film. It is a sawn or sliced layer of the actual species, so it takes light the way wood does, it ages the way wood does, and no two boards are the same, because no two trees are.

Underneath is a cross bonded core. The layers are laid at right angles to one another, and because timber moves far more across the grain than along it, each layer holds the one above it still. The board is built to argue with itself.

What that buys the person specifying it:

• Wide boards that stay flat, which is the look most clients are actually asking for when they say they want real wood
• Long boards, for the same reason
• Underfloor heating, which is where solid timber specifications most often come unstuck
• A floor that behaves the same in a humid coastal apartment and a dry centrally heated one

What it does not change: it is still wood, so it still marks, it still moves a little, and it still wants a sensible humidity range. Anyone who tells you a wood floor is dimensionally inert is selling you something that is not wood.

The honest way to put it is that engineered wood is not a substitute for real timber. It is real timber, built so that the width, the length and the room you actually have are no longer an argument against it.

One of six categories across our five factories: resilient flooring, laminate, engineered wood, decking, wall panels and fireproof building materials.