Parquetry floors are now relatively rare in early eighteenth-century houses in Ireland. Among the finest surviving examples is that in the Saloon at Russborough, Co. Wicklow, which is made up of a series of octagons and crosses of walnut¹ derived from Serlio, with a maple centrepiece of radiating petals. In the video below, wood specialist Sven Habermann describes the craftsmanship involved in constructing such a floor.

As with many floors in eighteenth-century houses, they are difficult to appreciate due to carpets and furnishings. The model below provides an orthographic view of the 858 sq ft saloon floor (33ft x 26ft), the pieces of which fit together like a large jigsaw. The gaps between each piece have been left slightly irregular to reflect the fact that the wood expands and contracts according to the season.

The geometry of the centrepiece is derived from twelve intersecting circles of the same diameter of the centrepiece itself, as seen in the model below.

The floor pattern intersects with a simple border, the same width as the outer planks of the octagons, into which they seamlessly blend. On one side of the room, the floor also accommodates a broad hearthstone of white Italian marble. When viewed from eye level, the floor appears to be made of up a broad variety of different timbers, but this is not the case. Except for the maple in the centre, the variety is provided by the shifting direction of the grain from piece to piece, which reflects the light in at different angles. As can be seen in the photo below, the grain is oriented along the long axis of each piece of walnut.

The finest floors ever executed in an Irish country house were those at Powerscourt, Co. Wicklow, destroyed by fire on 4 November 1974.

Now known only from photographs, the floors of the Saloon and Octagon room comprised complex geometries of inlay, comparable to floors found in Germanic states in the early eighteenth century, as described by Nele Luttmann. The array of timber varieties brought to the site at Powerscourt in the 1730s, and potentially used in the creation of these parquetry floors is discussed in Melanie Hayes’s chapter in Enriching Architecture: Craft and its conservation in Anglo-Irish building production, 1660–1760.

1. The wood was confirmed as walnut by Sven Habermann in laboratory tests following this interview. ↩︎