Meet the Preservation Collection: Inspired by our best-selling floors with an 8-week lead time.
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Solid French Oak flooring has been trending in recent years as homeowners seek new products that will help their interior design stand out. Like its American counterparts – White Oak and Red Oak – French Oak is prized for its strength, stability and timeless beauty. French Oak planks will tend to be a little darker than White Oak and may feature more variation in the grain. Oak grown in American forests often produces planks that are wider and longer than the French variety and tend to offer a straighter more subtle grain pattern. But on the whole, solid French Oak flooring will look, feel and perform very close to unfinished Oak floors made in America.
So, what are you really getting with solid French Oak flooring? For one thing, a higher price tag. The cost of shipping your French Oak floor from Europe is bound to be higher than sourcing White Oak from American manufacturers. Purchasing White Oak floors also ensures you’re supporting American workers and local businesses. By choose a White Oak floor from American, you’ll be helping to reduce greenhouse gases, as your floor won’t travel nearly as far as a floor shipped from Europe. And you’re more likely to get an on-time delivery since there are fewer links in the supply chain.
At Carlisle, we’ll put our wide plank White Oak floors up against solid French Oak flooring any day of week. Our wide plank specialists can walk you through the benefits of White Oak vs. French Oak and help you explore alternatives to vintage French Oak flooring. We can also explain the pros and cons of Oak vs. Ash or Cherry vs. Oak and the advantages of White Oak stair treads. With help from your Carlisle specialist, you can choose the hardwood, color, texture, finish and pattern that will create the wide plank floor of your dreams.
Explore and select from our gallery of our most popular finishes, specially categorized by the personalities and traits of the floor designs.
ExploreSolid French Oak flooring is a surface made with planks of wood cut from oak trees grown in France.
French Oak has hues of nutty brown and warm amber.
Both French Oak and White Oak have a Janka hardness rating of 1360. American Red Oak is slightly softer, with a rating of 1290.
French Oak is specifically from France, while European Oak could be from France, Germany, England or other countries in Europe.
French Oak tends to be a little darker than White Oak and the grain in a French Oak plank will tend to be more prominent.
When deciding on alternatives to solid French Oak flooring, you’ll have many options for customizing your Carlisle floor to get the exact appearance you desire.
While our White Oak floorboards most closely resemble solid French Oak flooring, we also offer a wide variety of other species that can create spectacular floors.
Wider planks add a greater feeling of spaciousness and luxury to a floor. Consistent widths produce a more even and formal feel, while varied or random widths add visual energy and a casual feel.
Whether you choose White Oak or another type of timber, you can use our proprietary grades to create a floor that has the perfect level of elegance or casualness for your space. Our Original Grade floors reveal more character in the wood, showing more knots, mineral streaks, ingrown bark and variation in color and grain patterns. Our Heirloom Grade minimizes these features for a more formal or refined appearance. And our Signature Grade blends the two to disperse the natural character of the wood across the floor.
With Carlisle, you can stain your solid Oak flooring to virtually any color you want. Rather than limiting you to a specific number of hues as our competitors do, we offer an unlimited choice of color and can match the hue of any item you bring to us.
If you’re installing your floor in an area with higher levels of moisture or humidity, you might consider an engineered floor instead of solid Oak. An engineered floorboard is made with several layers of material that are glued together and finished with a top layer of hardwood. The result is a floorboard that looks and feels like solid wood when you walk on it, but one that is more resistant to moisture and humidity.
To reproduce the look of vintage solid French Oak flooring, our craftsmen can apply a variety of texture treatments to any of our new floors. Our Hit or Miss technique adds saw kerfs to boards to recreate the look of planks that were cut at early sawmills, where the saw would frequently skip across the board and randomly leave marks. We can add Hand-Scraped Edges, reproducing the look of boards that were once scraped by hand to soften the transition between thicker and thinner floorboards. We can also add the kind of rough patches produced by boards milled at riverside watermills. And we can use wire brushes to wear down the softer grains in new floorboards to create the look of planks that have been gently worn by time and foot traffic.
When you come to Carlisle for alternatives to solid French Oak flooring, we’ll show you a universe of possibilities for creating a surface that perfectly reflects your sense of style and sophistication. For more than 50 years, our craftsmen have been handcrafting the finest wide plank floors in America. We rely on time-honored processes and we source the finest raw materials available to fashion one-of-a-kind floors that will become a defining feature of your home. Our wide plank specialists will work carefully with you to define your vision for your floor and help you choose the wood, grade, width, color and texture to create a masterpiece in wood that will delight all who enter your space.
