If you’ve ever had a WatchHouse coffee, you’ll know they take their spaces as seriously as their beans. So when their interior designer, Deidra Hodgson, asked us to floor their head office and warehouse apartments on Tanner Street, London Bridge, the brief was simple to say and harder to do: a floor that looks 200 years old, but was made last month.
Why not just use real reclaimed boards?
It’s the obvious question. Reclaimed floors are beautiful. But they are not cheap, and often uneven. They also move more with changes in humidity, which is rarely practical on a busy construction site when the windows are delayed.
An engineered reclaimed-effect floor gives you the character without the gamble. This one, from our Highbury Range of reclaimed-look floors, has open cracks, a textured surface and rough filled knots, all finished in high-quality Belgian oils. It’s stable, it’s consistent from board to board, and nobody walking across it would guess it hadn’t been salvaged from a Victorian mill.
If you want to see the same range working in a restaurant, we used a smoked Highbury plank at plates in Shoreditch.
The job
We supplied and fitted 150m² of plank flooring across three floors: the WatchHouse office, plus four warehouse apartments. Then we clad all 33 steps.
Brick walls, and why we used cork
A lot of this floor runs straight up to painted brick. Brick is beautiful, but it’s never straight, and wood floors need room to expand and contract. Skirting would hide the gap, but it would also hide the brick, which rather defeats the point of a warehouse.
So we used cork expansion strips at the transitions. Cork squashes as the floor moves, sits neatly against an uneven wall, and disappears into a reclaimed look far better than a gap or a bead of silicone. Look closely at the office wall photo: no skirting, just floor meeting brick.
The stairs
The steps got made-to-measure nosings, textured to match the floor. We also made them slightly wider than a standard nosing. Warehouse stairs are chunkier than your average townhouse flight, and a standard nosing would have looked skinny and out of proportion. A few millimetres doesn’t sound like much. On 33 steps, you notice.
The curved nosing
Then there was the spiral staircase in the office. Curves and planks aren’t natural friends. A straight nosing can’t follow a circle, and a run of short straight pieces ends up looking like the edge of a 50p coin.
So we made a curved oak nosing to run round the opening, shaped on site and trimmed with a router until it followed the line of the stairwell. The floor finishes against it in one smooth sweep.
It’s the bit of the job most people will never notice, which is how you know it’s right.
The apartments
Four warehouse apartments, big Crittall-style windows, and a lot of low afternoon light. That light is brutal on a cheap floor: it shows every repeat in the pattern and every patch where the finish is thin. Good oils and properly varied boards are what make a floor like this glow rather than glare.
The result
A floor with 200 years of character that will happily take a busy office, four homes and a lot of coffee spills. Exactly what you’d hope for from a company that serves coffee for a living.
If you’re working on a warehouse conversion, a loft or a commercial space and want the reclaimed look without the reclaimed headaches, come and see samples at our Shoreditch showroom.
Want stairs that run seamlessly into your floor? StairFlow, our continuous stair cladding system, uses oak from the same batch as your floor, from £180 per step. See how it works on our oak stair cladding page.
Or to talk about this project or one of your own, book online here.
Finished office and apartment photos courtesy of WatchHouse.
