Wood Flooring Advice

To Border or not to border?

This is often a key question when choosing parquet flooring and the good news is there’s no wrong or right answer. Ultimately it’s down to personal preference, but here are what our experts suggest you consider before deciding, along with some interesting trivia about the history of parquet borders.

To Border or not to border?

Before you decide whether to fit your parquet without or without a border:

  1. Think about  cost – adding a border will make fitting a parquet floor more complicated and time consuming, which in turn will make it  more expensive to install.
  2. Think about visibility – in our opinion parquet borders look fabulous and create a really attractive detail, but only if you can see them. Often the edge of your parquet floor will be covered or blocked from view by furniture, in which case the impact of the border may be lost.
  3. Think about style – a border will make your parquet floor look more traditional and arguably formal in style, whereas if you fit parquet without a border it will create a more informal and arguably more modern feel.
  4. Think about design – if you do choose to add a border there are all sorts of exciting design possibilities. You can do them in plank or parquet, to match or contrast  the rest of the floor, with or without tramlines, to be a subtle design detail or an eye catching feature. All of our parquet flooring in the same format can be mixed, and we can do planks to use as borders to match any of our parquet finishes.

It might also help you to know a little about the history of parquet borders:

Originally parquet borders were intended to be a decorative detail. In the C17th & C18th, even the great houses when they were first seen were more sparsely furnished and the edges of the floors were rarely covered. Intricate marquetry borders were often added to parquet floors to make the furnished area feel smaller and more intimate.

As time went on, borders were also used to define private and public spaces in great houses. Those rooms into which guests were invited to enter had borders that ran through the doorway from one room to another. Those into which they were not, or those leading ‘below stairs’  had borders that ran across the doorway.

Contrasting tramlines evolved as a simpler interpretation of the intricate marquetry borders mentioned above, and were a particularly effective yet subtle way of directing guests.

If you need any help or advice on whether to fit your parquet floor with or without a border, do get in touch, our friendly team will be pleased to discuss your particular project and answer your questions.

NEWSLETTER sign up

Keep up to date with all the new products and trends at Broadleaf