Restaurant Herringbone — Brixton Market

A 90-cover contemporary restaurant in Brixton Market commissioning a herringbone parquet floor for its ground-floor dining room as part of a broader brand refresh. The brief: warm, characterful, and built to handle 300 covers a day.

Commercial Herringbone

Herringbone is not a pattern typically associated with commercial flooring — most specifiers default to plain-laid planks for high-traffic environments. But when correctly specified with a commercial-grade lacquer, a well-glued herringbone parquet floor is entirely suitable for restaurant use and far more distinctive than the standard alternatives.

The key difference from residential specification is the finish: we used Bona Traffic HD with anti-slip additive, a two-component waterborne lacquer that achieves a wear resistance well beyond standard residential products. It is also water- and alcohol-resistant — critical in a restaurant environment where spills are not an exception but a constant.

Four-Day Window

The restaurant closed on a Monday morning and needed to re-open for Friday dinner service. Day one: removal of existing failed vinyl, sub-floor grinding and levelling. Day two: full adhesive application and herringbone laying. Day three: two coats of Bona Traffic HD. Day four: third coat, final polish, furniture reset, and handover.

We finished at 2pm on Thursday. The restaurant opened on time.

The Outcome

The floor became an immediate talking point among the restaurant's regulars. Within three months, the restaurant had been featured in two London food publications, both photographing the dining room floor as part of the interior aesthetic. A second restaurant in the same group subsequently commissioned us for their new site in Peckham.