Parquet, Herringbone & Chevron

Parquet (from the French “a small compartment”) is a geometric mosaic of wood pieces used for decorative effect in flooring. Parquet patterns are often entirely geometrical and angular—squares, triangles, lozenges—but may contain curves.

The term parquet (pronounced par-KAY) comes from a longstanding convention, which was to place wooden planks under thrones and other seats of honor, in order to visually demarcate the area from the rest of the room and to elevate it, literally and symbolically, above the floor.

This decorative floor area was known as the parc or parquet (meaning “little park”), and must evolved toward increasing decoration and inlaid patterning. By the Baroque era, parquet referred to both the technique and the genre of wooden floors inlaid in regular geometrical patterns.

Parquet floors were still something of a novelty in the 1620s, when Queen Marie de Medici of France installed an elaborate parquetry floor in the Luxembourg Palace  — this flooring technique was considered to be, like Marie herself, of Italian origin.

Through the next few decades, parquetry floors became THE  fashionable flooring in fancy Parisian homes and by the time English Queen Henrietta Maria (Marie de Medici’s daughter) installed parquet floors at Somerset House in 1661, after returning from exile in Paris, the technique had become accepted as French style.

The earliest examples of the Herringbone pattern can be seen in the intricate jewelry of the Ancient Egyptian elite and in fabric originating in Ancient Italy. In the Roman Empire the Herringbone pattern got its start when city architects in Rome realized that pointing road bricks in the same direction as foot traffic lent the roads more stability.

Named after its resemblance to the skeleton of a herring fish, the Herringbone pattern consists of an arrangement of rectangles or parallelograms in a repetitive pattern, based on the symmetries in the pattern (known as a wallpaper group). In simpler terms, it is a distinctive “V” shape. It started to become popular as a flooring in Europe as early as the 1500’s when it started out as brickwork. It was also known for people to scatter sand on their dirt floors and sweep the floor in a decorative pattern.

One of the first examples of wood herringbone can be found in the Francois 1 Gallery at the Chateau de Fontainebleau, which was installed in 1539.

It was designed and produced by Italian craftsman whom Francois had hired away from Italy and immediately started a fashion in patterned wood flooring. From the seventeenth century to the latter half of the eighteenth century, the popularity of parquet floors reached a fevered pitch. Patterned wood floors were laid in castles, palaces and the homes of the nobility and wealthy throughout Western Europe.