868 Flooring

868 Meadow Road Hardwood Flooring Installed 2022

The flooring at 868 Meadow Road is:

Green Certified Wood Flooring
American Heritage Floors
Home Legend
Wood Species: White Oak
Gunstock Oak Stain
Hardwood click-lock flooring with an engineered base
3/8” x 5” planks
30 Year Warranty
Green Guard product certified of low chemical emissions Gold
National Wood Flooring Association Member
World Floor Covering Association
Bamboo Antibacterial underlayment

Every floor on the main level of this home has Home Legend Hardwood Planks flooring—a green certified product for air quality and tree usage. A 7-layer finish provides everyday wear and tear protection. This product has achieved GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality Certification.

The hardwood floor installed at 868 Meadow is known as a Green Certified Hardwood floor because it uses wood in a sustainable way and is a low voc product because it is an interlocking click installation with no glue involved. The top 7” is of white oak cut in a wide plank manner and stained in a dark brown. The top layer is a solid, sawn wood layer, called a wear layer or a lamella. The bottom layers are made up of two layers of wood that is cross sectioned to increase the strength of the floor. The natural appearance, durability and longevity, ease of maintenance and repair, and eco-friendliness of this flooring is why it was chosen for 868 Meadow Road.

Hardwood flooring is real wood and preserves the unique textured grain and appearance of natural wood while laminate flooring is only an imitation. Although some types of high-quality laminate floors might look like real wood, there are far more differences between these products than what initially meets the eye. Laminate is not real wood. Laminate is a multi-layer synthetic flooring product. The core layer of laminate flooring is manufactured primarily from melamine resin and fiber board material. The top layer has an imprinted textured image (a photograph) made to look like real wood. There are high voc glues used and the top layer is simply a sticker that can easily tear.

Real wood is characterized by tremendous texture variation of the wood grain, which is why no two planks of hardwood flooring, whether solid or engineered, appear exactly alike. This is the wood flooring at 868 Meadow.

Flooring as an Architectural Design

Flooring as an architectural design element began in ancient Greece when the floor was also part of the system of building used for temples and other larger structures and care was taken about the choice of materials and the placement of them. The ancients also considered the flow of people across flooring and how the flooring would make people feel. More recently, Jose Luis Moro’s Flooring Volume 2: Design, Life cycle, Case Studies [i] examines the idea of flooring as an architectural design element beginning with Le Corbusier and following this historical line and ending with his own work of which case studies are provided. Moro does not hesitate to say that flooring, when done as part of the architectural perspective of a home, is a part of the architectural design process.

“Flooring constitutes an essential element of architectural design and can have strong visual impact…by reflecting the rhythm of the building structure” [ii]

This is found is 868 Meadow flooring which mirrors the minimal modernist aesthetic of this early Ranch Style home directly generative from the Prairie Style popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright. The color, the placement, the layout of the 868 floor all work to minimize the refractions many homes contain as found in thresholds between rooms, elevation or egress styles and stairs. Minimalism is not an easy task as any writer will tell you who has to reduce 1000 words to 50. The modernist conception of minimalism is exacting and can appear and feel cold; however, the flooring at 868 doubles as a warmth factor due to the natural coloration, the wide planks chosen and the open floor plan accentuated by no egress or other transitions which would disrupt the flow of living with a singular flooring design.

Archetypes in Architecture by Thomas Thiis-Evensen [iii] goes further into the evolution of building styles in respect to flooring. Directionality is the first consideration of design in flooring. “The directional theme concerns the way in which the form of the floor emphasizes certain motions, connecting one place to another.” The flooring at 868 emphasizes the open floor plan which connects rooms in a seamless fashion. The directional theme is designed in three ways: first the floor connects; second the floor leads into other areas and third the floor design is seen as a “path” which is seen “as only a delimited part of a larger area which continues outside.” The placement of the floor at 868 Meadow is in keeping with the Prairie School style attributes of the home in that the flooring also leads one to the side door connection the inside space of the home to the outdoor space of the backyard. [iv]

This “path” architectural design element is found in the floor of 868 Meadow in the direction of the hardwood floor boards which was designed to be horizontal to the length of the residence. The “path” is also delimited by the flow of furniture and the usual path taken on a daily basis. This is a harder design to install since placement of boards has to be considered from several angles and pre-placement is important so that boards with harmonious grains and colorations are placed alongside each other. Much care and consideration were taken with the placement of the floor and the choice of the flooring material which is sustainable, green certified and of the wider plank design so enjoyable to see after so many years of thinner flooring planks being the norm.

The architectural design of the flooring at 868 Meadow also corresponds with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style architectural ideas in which a home is “life itself taking form” especially in homes where the horizontal lines are designed to be pronounced and utilitarian as they are in 868 Meadow. The newly laid hardwood floor in 868 Meadow accentuates Wright’s ideas about the horizontal plane as an expression of life itself that it is “the human line of tenure on this earth” since we are connected to the earth through the horizontal flooring of nature or our buildings. [v] But, to be on this earth involves not only ‘tenure’. In addition to spreading out “by native character to environment”, a house should also be “married to the ground”. [vi]

The reflective nature of the 868 Meadow floor also expands the space downward (Bohuslan, from Scanorama, 1978). This more firmly connects the inside of the home with the natural world and the outside since substantiality is abstracted making ordinary objects like flooring and furniture to appear to be “freed from the floor on which they stand. They seem to stand only on their own shadows. The objects do not appear to stand on a ground equally substantial or stronger than the objects themselves…. Objects are optically detached and freed…” [vii] Each room is enlarged since the actual objects defining a room upward also define the room downward into their reflections. “The space is enlarged not only downwards in optical depth but also outwards because solid boundaries appear to be lighter, more distant and have greater mobility.” [viii] The reflective flooring in 868 Meadow allows the inside and outside to be more closely connected through the reflection which enlarges as well as creates new spaces in upward and downward vision. [xi]

Notes for Flooring Page

[i] Flooring Volume 2: Design, Life cycle, Case studies by Jose Luis Moro 2016 Publisher De Gruyter

See representatives sampling of Flooring Volume 2 at:

https://issuu.com/detail-magazine/docs/978-3-95553-313-7-bk-en-practice-fl

[ii] Ibid

[iii] Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1987). Archetypes in architecture. Oslo Norwegian University Press translated by Ruth Waaler https://www.idunn.no/doi/10.18261/9788215046419-2020-3#AFN7

[iv] See also, Bruno Zevi’s reference to the fact that Classical traditions also applied to spatial organization, and to his conception of the building as an independent entity in relation to its surroundings: B. Zevi, Architecture as Space, New York 1974, p. 107.

[v] E. Kaufmann and B. Raeburn (eds.), Frank Lloyd Wright, Writings and Buildings, New York 1970, p. 305.

[vi] Ibid

[vii] The Floor by Thomas Thiis-Evensen 1987

[viii] ibid

[ix] ibid the idea of enlargement of spaces due to reflection is not a new one in architectural or interior design; however, Thiis-Evensen describes it so well and assists in connecting the idea to the Prairie Style 868 Meadow; exhibits it is hard not to quote him a little more with his description of a throne on a dais, “Objects are optically detached and freed On the contrary, the floor seems to be non-supporting and thereby increases the detached air of the objects. Our illustration shows the throne dais (morja) in Seiryoden in Kyoto, where the dais seems to hover in the middle of a space bounded above by the four surrounding columns and below by their reflection in the floor.

We realize that in the relation between inside and outside the reflecting floor is important because it ‘enlarges’ a space…. The freedom, expansion and movement which the gleaming floor lends to objects applies also to ourselves. Like the objects we too seem to be ‘lighter’.”