Wood floors add charm and character to a home. Compared to other flooring options, wooden floors offer one-of-a-kind design features attributed to their innate composition and pattern. Their natural textures enhance a space in numerous ways, from added visual appeal to uniqueness. Aside from their burls and granular streaks, wood textures also include knots. Here is what you should know about wood knots in flooring and why they matter.
What Are Wood Knots?
Wood knots appear as dark rings, circles, or holes along the wood’s grain. They typically look like a mini, in-grown version of a stump’s surface. They occur when a tree’s trunk grows around a branch, signifying the point where the two meet and interrupt the tree’s natural granular pattern.
Like many other natural design features, wood knots come in different shapes, sizes, frequencies, and colors. Common variations include open, closed, sound, unsound, pin, red ring, black ring, and cluster knots. Each variation depends on the wood’s species and decay.
How Do They Affect Your Flooring?
Some knots fall out and weaken the surrounding wood’s structure, causing cracks. They create weak spots and spotty appearances on your floor’s surface. However, in engineered wooden planks, wood knots hardly affect your floor’s durability and quality.
Engineered wood consists of two main components: a top veneer made of a thin layer of real hardwood and a core made from compressed wood fiber mixes. Most of the plank’s structure and mechanical properties derive from the core, meaning that the wood knots in your plank hardly compromise your flooring’s durability. They just affect your floor’s surface layer. Plus, with the right filling, wood knots do little to no effect on your floors.
Why Do People Like Them?
Most people see wood knots as an imperfection—an abnormality in the wood’s grain. However, many also view wood knots as a characteristic feature that highlights wood’s natural aesthetic and appeal. They create rustic floors and add unique visual texture to your home’s interior design.
Wood knots further differentiate the look of different wood species, providing more flooring and style variations to explore. Red oak engineered wood flooring mainly features small and minimalistic knots, while others showcase larger and more frequent knots in their grain pattern. The type and commonality of the knots in a floor’s design varies depending on the wood used, its strength, and the limits on how many defects it can feature without compromising structure.
What you should know about wood knots in flooring is that they provide another distinctive charm to your wood floor’s appeal. They highlight its natural beauty and essence, creating a more earthy and authentic look. Wood knots paired with vibrant burls and strong granular patterns leave you with textured flooring that enhances your home in various ways, from added charisma to unique design features.