The Unique Beauty of a Wall-to-Wall Herringbone Floor

September 03, 2020

Design: Arrows & Bow
Build: San Jose Hardwood Floors

Flooring: Monarch Plank

Location: Bay Area, CA

Working together, the husband & wife design team at Arrows & Bow and Butch Kirk, owner of San Jose Hardwood Floors, envisioned a light colored herringbone floor that flowed seamlessly through multiple rooms in a large residential home. They chose the Monarch Plank Lago Collection Herringbone in the ‘Como’ color.

The sought after zig-zag herringbone appearance cherished by owners and designers alike creates unique challenges for installers. Success is contingent on careful forethought in planning the layout and flawless execution. Utilizing matching, wider planks as perimeter borders can simplify the design process and installation, but for this project, San Jose Hardwood Floors took on the complex challenge of installing herringbone wall-to-wall throughout the home.

Without the aid of borders, the herringbone pattern needed to seamlessly flow throughout the house without the peaks of the zig zags falling in awkward locations. “We utilized CAD to create multiple mock-ups, running Monarch Plank's herringbone pattern through the whole house starting from different rooms,” comments Kirk of San Jose Hardwood Flooring. “Once we settled on the best start location we then tweaked the exact flooring positioning to make sure every room looked good before getting signoff from the homeowner. It was a grueling process, but our installation was an almost perfect match to our mock-up, which really is exactly what you want in a project."

Other unique features of the home included step downs that provided an opportunity to change the pattern direction to attractively transition to the geometry of each room.