Lynn recently bought a 1960 ranch house and asked me whether I thought her wood parquet floors (small photo to the right) were original. Almost without a doubt I answer: Yes. The lead photo above is my dining room floor. This floor is original to my 1951 colonial-modern ranch. The parquets are each 12″ wide. They are made from fullsize pieces of wood flooring — this is not a thin veneer. In fact, somewhere in my travels I have heard that parquet flooring like mine was more expensive to purchase and install than the more common long runs of oak tongue-in-groove flooring. Wood parquet was more complicated, more fussy, and therefore, more expensive. The adjacent, step-down living room, by the way, got wall-to-wall carpet.
We have explored recently what color stain is most appropriate for your midcentury hardwood floors — the mass, we believe, were done in “natural”, like mine. But we’ve also seen darker stains.