At Real Wood Floors we invest a good deal of time crafting names and identities for our flooring collections. It’s important for us to get to the heart of each one.
With February here and the celebration of romantic love ala St. Valentine, we invite you to fall in love with one of our favorite collections, Tasmania.
We feel Tasmania appropriate this month because, after all, the exotic island is rather heart-shaped (at least the way this author clumsily draws hearts).
Falling in Love with Tasmania: Beauty and Brawn
Tasmania, the island state off Australia’s south coast, offers breathtaking beauty in its mountains, lakes, and plateaus. Green fields, lush vineyards, blue lakes and rivers, brown mountains, and ginger vistas create a landscape with a remarkable color palette.
The Tasmania collection includes eight inspiring selections of finely crafted, engineered wood flooring. We call it beauty and brawn. A unity of elements.
The collection offers brawn: extra wide planks of 9 1/2 inches or 6 1/2 inches, with variable lengths up to 7 or 8 feet. The wood is sturdy with a 9/16-inch-thick profile.
Much of the wood in the Tasmania collection has a mill-run look—a beautiful mixture of imperfections and clean wood grain, resulting in natural, charming, long-length planks.
This collection is unique and perhaps best suited for the more adventurous in heart.
With adventure and brawn, there is also beauty. Like the rustic charm of Tasmania, the wood boards have character. Brushed textures reveal the authentic wood grain.
The Tasmanian Oak and European White Oak, textured and gorgeous, effortlessly bring warmth and charm to all types of homes. For houses with large open spaces, the wide planks truly complement the space. This brawny collection, with an elegant top-coat finish with an ultra-matte low sheen, sustains wear and tear and still looks great. Kids, pets, lots of traffic, it won’t show up as much on a lower sheen floor like this one. It is more forgiving and practical.
Whether you have a house full of kids and pets (like some of us here at RWF), or large open spaces, or a slightly eclectic style, odds are you will fall in love with Tasmania.
Enchanting Elegance
When retired St. Louis music teachers, Jan and Janet Null, built a new home in the Missouri Ozarks, they wanted a floor that matched their collection and decor. Their love for 18th and 19th-century furnishings meant the flooring had to complement that.
They didn’t want to install it themselves though they could have. In 1979, Jan and his father-in-law laid flooring in the Null home, then near St. Louis. Jan jokes that his family lived with the squeaks in that house for forty-one years. The floor wasn’t fastened well, and it moved a great deal.
With his new Tasmania floor, he commented (rather joyfully) that there’s no movement or squeaking.
Jan said the beauty of all of RWF’s flooring is simply this—the flooring is intuitive to you. A part of you that you might not have considered before. But there you are, and it fits you.
The Null spirit? The spirit of Tasmania.
Beauty and brawn says our brochure. For the Nulls, Tasmania is a name that has an appeal—the appeal of something that is enchanting and elegant from afar. That’s what Jan and Janet think of when they think of their floor. An enchanting elegance.
For the Nulls, their combination of the hand-brushed, super-wide European Oak boards of Devonport coupled with other Hickory appointments, complements their eighteenth and nineteenth century furniture, and they couldn’t be happier. And Jan didn’t have to install it this time around.
Does Tasmania Speak to You?
The Tasmania collection offers flooring you can envision with any kind of furniture. Tasmania works well with an eclectic home. It works well with mid-century modern. The collection never calls attention to itself. Though it has filled-in knots and cracks, it is very smooth like the placid lakes that hide among the mountains of Tasmania.
