French Oak Flooring Dublin
French Oak Flooring Ireland
French Oak comes in the following 3 widths, 6″, 8″ and 10″ boards. French Oak flooring is renowned for its durability and timeless style. Its one of the few floors that gets better with age. The Oak itself comes from a part of France with a very similar climate to Ireland making it suitable for Irish floors.
We stock long lengths. The majority of hardwood floors sold in Ireland and England are in shorter lengths of 2 to 7 foot – ours start at 6ft and go all the way to 12.5 foot, The side edges are tongue and grooved. The ends are not as the boards are too long to fit in any machine so they are cross cut.
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French Oak Flooring - Interesting History
France has the finest oak forests in the world and it’s all thanks to the French Royal Navy….
In 1669 Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert expanded and reorganised France’s forests planting premium quality oak varieties suitable for building a navy to fight the British.
This legacy was built on by Napoleon, who in 1803 banned all tree felling without state authority. Two years later, 1805, he decreed that every oak felled must be more than 150 years old and replaced by a new, premium oak.
It took an astounding 3,400 oak trees (30 hectares of forest) to build just one 74 gun ship-of-the-line. Over two hundred years the Britain’s forests fell by 50% to cover 5% of the land, just 1% in Ireland.
The very same year as this far-sighted decree, the battle of Trafalgar took place rendering French naval demands redundant for a generation. Then, in November 1859, the Gloire, the first ironclad battleship was launched by the French navy.
Still, thanks to this far-sighted forest management policy France today has 34,000 square miles of oak forests compared to 4,000 in the UK and less than 2,000 in Ireland.
