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The timeless angled block, cut and laid by hand in oak chosen for its grain long before its colour.
9 floors in this collection
Herringbone is the floor that quietly tells everyone the room was thought about. Our herringbone flooring in Cambridge is engineered oak, cut into short blocks and laid at a precise 45 or 90 degrees so the grain steps across the room in a continuous zig-zag. It is the pattern that has dressed townhouse drawing rooms and college halls for two centuries, and it still feels current in a new-build kitchen extension.
Because every block is set by hand, the quality of a herringbone floor is decided as much by the fitting as by the board. We dry-lay, balance the pattern to the room rather than the wall, and set the perimeter so the zig-zag reads cleanly from the main doorway — the view you actually live with.
Each block is genuine engineered oak: a wear layer of real oak bonded to a dimensionally stable multi-ply core, so the floor holds its shape over underfloor heating and through Cambridge winters. Blocks are typically supplied around 600 × 100 mm or 500 × 90 mm, with finishes ranging from a near-invisible matt lacquer to deep smoked and oiled tones.
The collection runs from pale, raw-looking oak through to almost-black smoked blocks, so the same pattern can feel Scandinavian and calm or rich and traditional depending entirely on the finish you choose.
Herringbone rewards a room with a little space to read the pattern — living rooms, hallways, and open-plan kitchen-diners are the classic settings. In a hallway it draws the eye straight through the house; in a living room it gives a flat plane a sense of movement and craft. For a sharper, more contemporary geometry, compare it with our chevron collection, where the blocks meet in a continuous point rather than a step.
Yes. The engineered oak construction is built to cope with the gentle expansion and contraction of underfloor heating far better than solid block parquet, which is one of the main reasons we recommend it for modern Cambridge extensions.
Herringbone takes longer to set out and lay than a straight plank floor, so fitting is more involved. We price every floor to the room after measuring, so the fairest answer comes from a quick site visit or a plan.
Often, yes. Bring a photo or an offcut to the showroom and we will help match the block size, tone and finish as closely as the current range allows.
