Showroom

Walking on Wood

Bespoke parquet and timber flooring, made to order. Showrooms in London and Manhattan, founded 1996.

Walking on Wood is a wood flooring supplier at 1127 Second Avenue, and it is a family business with one other showroom, in London. The New York room serves designers, architects, developers and contractors as well as private clients, which is a wider door than most of this district keeps.

What it sells is bespoke hardwood flooring rather than a stocked range in fixed widths. Boards are specified to a project, which means species, width, length, grade and finish are all decisions rather than a product code, and the showroom exists to make those decisions in front of actual material instead of from a sample card.

A flooring sample is cut to a size that flatters it, and grade in particular is invisible at sample scale. Character grade with knots and colour variation reads as texture across a whole room and as damage on a hundred millimetre offcut, and the only way to settle it is to see a larger laid area.

Second Avenue in the upper fifties puts the showroom within a short walk of the D&D and the A&D, so a flooring decision can sit in the same morning as the kitchen and the fittings it has to work with.

The showroom is open on weekdays from 9 to 5 and takes no appointment. It serves designers, architects, developers and contractors as well as private clients.

Decide the floor before the joinery, not after. Floor level sets the door undercuts, the skirting height and whether an existing threshold still works, and a board thickness changed late is a change to every door in the apartment. Take the existing floor build up to the first visit.