The best wooden floors are like veteran Hollywood stars - becoming all the more alluring and charismatic as they age. The down side of this is that anyone building or renovating right now surely faces the prospect of merely handing down the enjoyment of distinguished, aged wooden floors to their grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren! Not only that, but who knows what the fashion for flooring will be that far down the line, dealing an uncertain fate to the wood by the time it reaches its peak. So what can be done? Since its beginnings in 1998, Heywood Vloeren from Oss in the Netherlands has served connoisseurs’ desires to lay something extraordinarily special under their feet. The Van der Heijden brothers have made it their business to produce unique, bespoke hardwood floors to cover both the domestic and international market. Over the years, they have crafted an impressive selection of designs, dimensions, strengths and colors using special treatments involving brushes, scratching techniques, smoking and aging. The company has carefully expanded its range in the process to meet its customers’ specific requirements.

At DOMOTEX 2019, Heywood Vloeren is showcasing three different forms of dual-layer parquet floors that have each been pre-aged with a selection of these special treatments - Aged Antique, Aged Knotting Hill and Aged Shrunk. The Antique line is based on hand-carved planks and a herringbone pattern with natural-effect open fissures and characteristic knots. The Knotting Hill collection also focuses on aged planks in a herringbone design, but with a surface finished in a brushed, raw appearance featuring naturally undulating raised knots and bandsaw trails. The third option, Aged Shrunk, closely resembles its two cousins, but with an additional authentically age-shrunken effect on the surface. One feature all three lines have in common is the many options in terms of colors, plank widths and strengths, all provided in the same dual-layer format of European oak surface set on a practical WBP-plywood base.