Flooring Grades - Prime, Natural and Rustic

Browsing through the variety of flooring products, we quickly become aware that price of flooring is changing in line with a specification feature of the product called grading.

Floor grading is linked to the type of timber, which is selected as material for the planks / blocks. There are various classifications used on the market, but in UK there three main groups - Prime, Natural and Rustic.

Knot-free parts of the trunc of tree is only 25% of its body, so this amount of timber will have the highest value for the manufacturer, therefore prices for prime flooring will be signficantly higher than Rustic, in many cases double.

The general definitions of these grades are:

• Prime Grade - clear of knots and almost no colour variation throughout the plank, or between any other plank / blocks in the batch.

• Natural Grade - limited size of knots and some colour variation is allowed throught the plank, or between any planks / blocks in the batch.

  • For parquet blocks this will up to 5 mm

  • For engineered and solid wood planks it can be anything up to 10 - 15 mm and number of knots should be limited up to 2 per plank.

• Rustic Grade - any size or frequency of knots or cracks is allowed and any colour variation is allowed throughout a plank, ot batch of flooring.

Boen, Kahrs & Junckers

Some manufacturers will use completely different names for the same thing. With Boen flooring it is all about music for example - they look at the grain of the timber as "calm", "smooth" or "busy", so they would use words like "alegro", "andante" or "animoso". Kahrs flooring will use terms related to the type of lifestyle, for example "city", "country", "classic" and "capital". Like Quick

The popular commercial floors brand Junckers' use "Classic" for "Prime" and "Variation" for "Rustic".