Do you hate parquet floors?

They are not terrible, OP.

You are a nitwit.

Which flooring would you prefer, OP? For me it depends on the climate and the house or room style. I like old French tiles in the kitchen and vestibule. Linoleum is nice in a kitchen. Terrazzo is good in warm climate. Parquet is good if the room has some elegance. Hardwood long boards. Painted wood. Whatever.

Hardwood. Light or dark is fine. Carpet, cement. I don’t know...for reasons I don’t understand, I am pretty fine with anything but parquet. I think it’s because the basketweave effect makes me think of wicker, macrame, something crafty and busy and insubstantial.

I find parquet rather attractive. Perhaps you associate it with something dreadful, OP?

I guess it just comes down to personal taste. It makes everything look cheap to me and it’s all I can see when present.

Op: You can change out flooring you know.

I actually love parquet myself. But it can easily look old-fashioned and can easily look out of place, especially in homes where there's original parquet flooring and the rest of the home was modernized). I've seen some really great uses of it, particularly in older, larger estates or nicer townhomes, especially when there are good windows to really illuminate the beauty in the wood. R5 It's actually very expensive flooring, so cheap isn't the correct word. But in your photos above, I'd agree that displays a poor use of it. There is doesn't match the rest of the updated home.

I prefer butter

OK, I’ll say that I’ve seen some very nice looking, intricate parquet that enhanced the decor in homes that had a lot of woodwork and darker tones throughout. But against flat painted walls, they look so terrible to me.

I like the apt at r5. But the HOA is so high. Why?

Ok you should have been specific, its THAT particular cheap mid-century middle-class apartment parquet.

Yes, its not very nice.

R10 It’s typical in northwest DC. There are two kinds of condos: Expensive ones (say starting around $450k for a small one bedroom) or affordable ones (starting around $380k for a small one bedroom) with HOA fees that range from $500 to $1,200. Either way, you have to be well to do or rich.

Here is an older, more complex design, a variant on parquet designs often called "Versailles parquet"

Parquet has a vast palette of designs.

What's the problem?

R13 That is not at all what I meant by parquet. I meant the kind seen in R11. I consider inlaid wood designs to be something very different even though they are both technically parquet.

How do you feel about this, OP? (Yusupov palace)

R16 That’s beautiful. That’s designed, not from a Home Depot box.

Well that's my point. Next time you need to post a screed about design, be more specific. Nobody "hates parquet floors" but many people laugh at and hate the crap plain parquet in "crap apartments".

It's like saying "I hate oil paintings!"

R18 Yes—“crap apartments” of half a million to a million dollars in my neighborhood. The ones you’re showing are the types only seen in multimillion dollar mansions around here, and so they’re not really on my mind as realistically within consideration.

R15, they are not just "technically parquet." They are both precisely parquet.

You are inarticulate and aspire to a design sensibility far above your station.

Your 500K - 1MK apartments were built for average working family and that is the crap finishing that they put in at the time. They are crap apartments that have increased in value, not craftsmanship. Do you know anything about anything?

R21/R22 You’re either a really vicious human being, or else you run a parquet flooring company and feel personally attacked by someone having different taste and a different personality than you do. Do you always attack people’s characters when you disagree about something as superficial as interior design?

OP--gurl, what's with you? Ah well, we're gays--we have violent opinions about NOTHING.

R22, you sound like Paul Lynde on a bender? What's up with your pretentiousness? Do you have a little dick?

Thank you, R25.

R22 reads exactly how I’d expect to be confronted by a drunk, off-camera Anderson Cooper or a coked-up on-camera Andy Cohen. The dark side of gay nature.

What an idiot. Do you also hate upholstered furniture, OP? Because if you hate one type of upholstered furniture, you hate all types.

Versailles is chock full of beautiful antique parquet flooring, which you hate.

Yes, OP, I have the same floors and I hate that crap parquet as well. But don't you have to cover the floors with a pretty high percentage of carpet?

Though that's a really well built building that HOA is a bit high for 800 sq ft and I hope it includes all major utilities. It's also too far from any metro. Otherwise it's a good apt.

Huge expanses of bare wood floor, parquet or no, don't look good to me. More important, they're hard on your feet.

Love them

I like to punish them.

You can easily install a nice laminate floating floor over top of all that offensive parquet. It is a do-it-yourselfer job.

I actually really like these newish gray porcelain woodgrain/linen pattern floor tiles that mimic wood but aren’t. They’ll be really outdated in five years though, won’t they?

R33, yes.

I'll take the cheap parquet over laminate, thanks.

It seems to look a bit better with a darker stain.

They must be cheap because every new apartment building I see has the same kind of parquet flooring. There are definitely nice kinds of parquet but only expensive apartments have them

Thank you for understanding what I am talking about R36. Everyone here is getting all semantic and trying to shame me because Versailles has parquet floors. Obviously that is not what I mean looks cheap.

Oh sweetie its about real estate values and what kind of housing stock goes up, in what neighborhoods. I lived in cheap student apartments with beautiful 100 year old parquet floors. And cheap student apartments with revolting carpeting. I moved to Brooklyn in the 80s and there were entire forgotten neighborhoods that had been built exceedingly well, with beautiful wood and plaster and marble details, ceilings, walls, floors, doors, all at affordable rentals. No longer. The fact is you just said "parquet" like it was one thing. And anything you can't afford NOW, in your desired neighborhood, is not "parquet". Because the world revolves around your navel. Sheesh.

R11 That particular style of parquet flooring does appear to be a bit crude. I have parquet floors throughout my apartment (except the galley kitchen), but the design is more subtle with each piece being six strips instead of three, which creates a less jarring appearance. And, the wood color/contrast of each piece is more closely matched so that helps, too. I've always liked wood flooring over carpets. To each his own, I guess. I've known people who've detested wood floors as well.

OK, listen. I have heard many people say “I hate carpeting” because hardwood floors have been en vogue for years. Do all those people mean that all carpeting everywhere is destestable and inferior? Should I steer the conversation toward proving that Islamic rug making is a fine art, and scour the Internet for examples of exquisite, lush carpeting in forty million dollar homes and then tell them that they are morons and their mothers should have sliced up their wombs with chopsticks to prevent them from ever having been born?

Some of these reactions are extreme. Call me crazy if you must, but seriously...chill out.

But r40, that’s what entertains me. The bitchiness. I don’t take them too seriously nor personally.

I don't hate them, honestly I can't tell if they are parquet or butter.

OP just wanted to write the word parquet. Admit it, OP.

R43 If only. Nope, I saw a condo for sale that I liked except it has an awful cheap looking (to me) basketweave parquet floor. And I thought, “hmm, there’s a lot of this around here and so someone probably likes it—so let me ask if I am the only one who hates it.” And the answer I got was basically “you should kill yourself because Versailles has ornate inlaid floors.”

Hate them, they dry out and the tiles pop out.

^^^ Where do you live, above the arctic circle?

They put a lot of that cheap tile parquet down in the 60's and 70's when they started building homes on concrete slabs. They put hardwoods on slabs now but back then the cheap route was to do parquet on slabs and hardwood on pier and beam homes. Yea it looks generic and cheap but it's really a fairly easy fix.

Parquet floors used to be the Holy Grail of apartments in Frisco circa 1974. Renters would sport wood and lubricate finding parquet floors in those old, moldy 2 bedrooms.

Yes! Looks cheap and tacky.

R46, no shit, those wooden tikes are often very cheaply made. The wood can dry out and crack, or it can absorb moisture and swell, causing the whole floor to buckle. The individual pieces are held together with a thin wire which can rust and disintegrate. Those wooden tiles can be very problematic.

Most parquet floors make me think it was made from the remnants of other discarded wood projects.

It's what they had leftover and decided not to waste the pieces so made flooring from all the mismatched and odd-sized pieces.

R52 Yes, that’s how I see them, too.

R50 No need for the name calling.

We have parquet on the first floor of the family cottage that's on the New England coast which is not used during the winter (so there's extreme moisture/temperature variations throughout the year). As I've already mentioned, the apartment I live in has it, too, and neither have ever popped, warped or anything like what your image shows. The parquet in my unit is 50+ years old and at the cottage it's 25+ years.

New York City in Noho and they popped out.

agree I hate parquet too...............the one time I didnt was when I saw Brooke Astors park avenue apartment library photgraphed in a magazine and that room had parquet floors and they were stunning.

"I've always liked wood flooring over carpets. " Jeez, R39. Who would put wood flooring over carpets?

Or were you in OP's composition class?

I am a poor teacher, and we have white epoxy polished concrete floors. I did it myself, it took like 900 hours. All other floors sucks, and are filthy and gross. Maybe brick, like in Johnson glass house, or linoleum in the right md century house.

Parquet is a reasonably priced wood floor, popular before laminates. Like laminates they are usually installed as floating floors over a felt or similar pad. They are still used for dance floors because of this. The alternating directions minimize the effects of swelling. The small pieces use parts of a tree too small to be made into veneer or dimensional lumber.

The best way to install these floors are to glue each tile to the other tiles on all four sides with the tongue and groove over a thin foam or couple layers of building felt, and held down with shoe molding all around the perimeter. The floor will be quiet and resilient. They are simply practical and are a natural material, bordering on utilitarian and as such are neither cheap nor prestigious.