Floors for
the lasting
house.
Reclaimed hardwoods, hand-hewn parquetry, and quarry-direct stone — laid by the same eight craftsmen who have walked our floors for nineteen years. London & Carrara, since MMVII.
Six materials,
each one chosen
on its own terms.
Six material disciplines held within a single atelier — milled, finished, and laid by the same hands that select them at the source.
Reclaimed Hardwood
French oak from Bordeaux distilleries, English elm from Norfolk barns, American chestnut from Appalachian tobacco sheds. Re-milled to a 12 mm wear-layer.
French Parquetry
Versailles, Chantilly, Aremberg. Hand-cut panels in our Whitechapel mill, drawn at 1:5, glued in hide, tongued in oak. Patterns held since the seventeenth century.
Italian Marble
Carrara Statuario, Calacatta Vagli, Verde Issorie. Drawn block-by-block from quarries we have walked since 2009. Bookmatched on the floor where the room asks for it.
Stone & Terracotta
Limestone from the Lubéron, sandstone from York, terracotta tomettes from Salernes. Cut in our atelier, finished in old methods — riven, brushed, sandblown, waxed.
Custom Inlays
Brass thresholds, pewter strapwork, mother-of-pearl monograms. Drawn with the architect, cut on a five-axis router, hand-fitted on site.
Restoration & Finishing
Lifted, sorted, planed, re-laid. Original Georgian boards returned to the room they were felled for. Finished in linseed, beeswax, hard-wax-oil — never in plastic.
Why a floor
of known origin
ages slowly.
Three observations from nineteen years of laying floors in houses that change owners three or four times. Scroll, and we'll set them down in turn.
Origin.
A board with a place of birth wears differently. Old-growth oak, slow-grown in a damp Aquitaine wood, behaves nothing like a kiln-rushed plantation tree from Asia.
Patina.
A floor finished in oil and wax — never plastic — accepts the room. It darkens by the hearth. It silvers in the south light. It records the family without ruining for it.
Hand.
Eight craftsmen, each one over a decade in our employ. The same hands that select the wood at the source plane it, lay it, and return three years later to oil it again.
Lifted. Returned.
One floor, one
hundred & eighty years.
Drag the handle to compare the original Georgian floor of № 84 Bedford Square — as we found it under three layers of vinyl, and as we set it back in spring of 2025.
Five floors,
five conversations.
A small carousel of recent commissions. The full ledger — two hundred and forty floors since MMVII — is available on request, by post.
The Albany Floor
Mayfair, London · 2025
Villa Calacatta
Lago di Como · 2024
The Notting Hill Versailles
Notting Hill, London · 2024
The Marais Pierre
Marais, Paris · 2024
The Cotswolds Tomette
The Cotswolds · 2023
We were warned a Georgian floor would crack within a winter. Three winters on, ours has only darkened — exactly as we were told it would.
Specify a
floor.
A short note is enough. Adèle reads every inquiry personally and replies within three working days, by hand if you ask.
42 Buxton Street
Whitechapel, London E1
Via di Miseglia 12
Carrara, MS 54033
atelier@grainfloors.co
+44 20 7247 8804
Tue — Sat
09h — 18h, GMT