Engineered Timber Flooring in European Oak

Choosing a floor

Engineered or Solid Timber Flooring: Which to Buy in New Zealand

Both are real wood. What differs is how the board is built — and that decides how it behaves in a New Zealand house.

Solid timber flooring: one piece of wood, top to bottom

A solid board is milled from a single piece of timber through its full thickness. Wood moves across the grain as it takes up and gives off moisture, and a solid board has nothing inside it restraining that movement, so it swells through a damp winter and shrinks back after a summer of heat pumps and dry indoor air. So solid floors need generous expansion allowance and on-site acclimatisation. Solid’s advantage: plenty of timber above the tongue, so it can be sanded back and recoated many times.

Engineered timber flooring: a real wear layer over a cross-layered core

An engineered board is a genuine hardwood wear layer bonded over a core of layers laid at right angles. Ours is European oak, engineered to our specification overseas. Those cross layers pull against each other, restraining how far the board can move across its width when humidity changes. That stability is why engineered is the usual specification over a concrete slab, over underfloor heating, and in commercial timber flooring where the building is heated and cooled year round. Underfloor heating should be run so the floor surface stays at or below 27°C. The wear layer is real timber, so an engineered floor can still be sanded back and recoated — it has less to give than a solid board, so wear-layer depth is the figure worth asking any supplier about. Ours is 4mm on Petit Château.

Which to buy

We supply engineered timber flooring and nothing else — deliberately. Timber flooring in New Zealand has to cope with houses that run damp through winter and dry once the heating goes on, and most new build is slab-on-ground. Solid still makes sense if you are matching existing boards in a villa restoration, or laying direct to joists over a ventilated subfloor for maximum sanding life. We do not supply solid, so that is a job for someone else.

Start with the flooring options, pick your format, then narrow it down through the collections. What timber flooring costs in New Zealand depends mostly on format and grade; ours sits between $99 and $320 per square metre, supply only.