For decades, the parquet floors of West London’s Victorian and Edwardian houses were treated as an inconvenience. They were carpeted over, lifted out, or buried beneath laminate. Now the conversation has reversed. From Battersea to Notting Hill, restored chevron, herringbone and wide-plank oak are reappearing in the city’s period rooms, no longer as a flourish but as the starting point of a serious renovation. It is one of the quieter shifts in how West London is decorating its homes, and one of the most telling.
A trend with momentum behind it
The signals are easy enough to read. Google Trends data shows UK interest in herringbone wood floor, chevron parquet and engineered oak floors climbing steadily over recent years rather than spiking and fading. Pinterest’s annual Predicts reports have repeatedly named warm woods and pattern-laid floors among the strongest interior themes, while Houzz UK’s renovation studies place flooring consistently among the most-upgraded elements of a whole-house refurbishment. The movement is one the design press has been chronicling in parallel: House & Garden, ELLE Decoration and ES Magazine have all returned, in recent issues, to natural materials, patterned timber and the pleasures of a properly finished floor.
There is a housing-market dimension too. Savills and Knight Frank both note that prime London owners are staying in their homes for longer than they did a decade ago, with stamp duty and the cost of moving doing much of the work. Renovations are being scoped accordingly: less cosmetic, more structural, more inclined to put money into elements that will outlive the next redecoration cycle. Floors fall squarely into that category.
Much of this conversation is happening on West London’s doorstep. Waxed Floors, a specialist in custom engineered hardwood flooring based in Battersea Rise for over twenty years, has worked with homeowners, architects and interior designers across London on projects ranging from Clapham townhouses to contemporary new-builds, and has watched chevron, herringbone and wide-plank oak move from occasional request to dominant brief.
A brief history of disappearance
The story of how parquet vanished is, in its way, a story about post-war taste. Carpet was warmer, cheaper and felt unmistakably modern; through the seventies, eighties and nineties, original boards and parquet blocks went out of period houses by the skip-load. The 2000s offered laminate as a faster, lower-commitment substitute. Many of the floors that survived spent decades hidden beneath underlay, gripper rods and adhesive, and bear the marks of it. Parquet, by its nature, asked for time and skill that the prevailing renovation cycles were not built to give it.
More than nostalgia
What is bringing it back is less a wave of nostalgia than a change in how houses are being lived in. Engineered construction has resolved the practical objections that once made wood awkward in London houses, behaving more predictably over underfloor heating and through the city’s swings of humidity. Pattern-laid floors flatter precisely the architecture West London has in abundance: tall ceilings, deep cornicing, long sightlines from hallway through to garden room. The grey minimalism of the 2010s has receded in favour of texture and warmth, and FSC and PEFC certification has settled the sustainability question quietly in the background.
A neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood picture
The shift reads differently across the map. In Battersea and Clapham, original pitch-pine and oak parquet often turns up mid-renovation, and the instinct is increasingly to restore rather than replace. Chelsea, Fulham and Notting Hill favour the grand reception room treatment: pattern-laid floors that lend a room its proportions back. Holland Park and Kensington tend toward heritage-led restoration where flooring is treated as part of the architecture. Chiswick and Ealing prioritise warmth and family-grade durability, while Richmond and Barnes balance period detail with the realities of open-plan living.
A view from the workshop
“Chevron and herringbone are by far the fastest-growing category of enquiry we see, particularly from West London and south-west London postcodes,” a spokesperson for Waxed Floors notes. “Customers are increasingly treating the floor as the starting point of a renovation rather than the last detail to think about. There is a real appetite for wider boards, 200mm and above, in richer, more natural finishes. On a lot of period projects, the brief now combines restoring existing parquet with newly laid engineered wood elsewhere, so the look carries through the house.”
What’s actually being specified
The choices are remarkably consistent. Engineered oak in herringbone or chevron, often in prime grade, with boards between 200 and 260mm. Finishes that lean warm rather than cool: brushed, lightly oiled, occasionally smoked, in place of the cold greys and heavy stains of the last decade. Flooring is carried unbroken from the entrance hall into the reception rooms, so the architecture reads as a single thought rather than a sequence of separate ones. Period features worked with rather than against, certified timber as a baseline assumption rather than a talking point.
A question of permanence
The return of parquet, in the end, is less about retro aesthetics than about permanence. West London is staying put and furnishing accordingly. A well-laid wooden floor outlasts almost every other decision made in a renovation. The best ones, restored or new, are not what catches the eye first. They are what everything else in the room is quietly arranged around.
