Who has experience with parquet flooring in the kitchen?

Our parquet has been in place for 8 years now and apart from the usual signs of wear, it still looks more or less like it did on the first day. In the living area, the same wood is more worn. I wouldn’t want to lay anything else at all.

Just a quick note: We have a closed kitchen on the ground floor; from the beginning it was clear that only tiles would be suitable, since there is also a terrace door leading directly into the kitchen.

However: Even with a kitchen in the living area, I would personally always choose tiles. Because I know myself. When I cook/bake/preserve, something always falls to the floor, which I sometimes only notice hours later. When washing by hand, something drips to the floor, when loading and unloading the dishwasher, when refilling the coffee machine, when peeling and cutting vegetables (I love beetroot...), when baking cookies, when decorating cakes... This can really be a challenge for tiles and grout! (Yes, for that exact reason we also installed a drain in the kitchen floor...)

In short: You have to decide for yourself. If you are attentive cooks where little to nothing falls on the floor, parquet is certainly nice to look at. For messy people like me, it would be pearls before swine.

We had strip parquet flooring in the kitchen for 10 years (condominium for rent, first occupancy). A disaster, that's just not acceptable! Every item you drop leaves a mark on the floor... you have to be extremely careful because of moisture. No thanks!

If I were to have parquet in the open-plan area, I would skip the kitchen, level it out there, and lay tiles with a plank look. The tiled planks should be in a contrasting color rather than trying to directly imitate the parquet.

I also have parquet flooring in my kitchen – just like in the entire apartment. It looks great, is easy to maintain, and I don’t have any problems with dripping pots, moisture on the floor, or scratches. The parquet looks exactly the same as in the rest of the house.

I honestly don’t know how I’m supposed to make huge messes every day. Continuously dropping pots, pans, and dishes on the floor that destroy the parquet also seems like a myth to me. Otherwise, tiles would be even worse. If a heavy pot falls on the tiles, the damage is probably greater with the chipped tile than with the parquet.

Besides, there are hands to hold onto as well as cloths. I don’t know how you all cook and bake

(Yes, that’s exactly why we also installed a drain in the kitchen floor....)

That would make me feel like I’m in a slaughterhouse. Messing around, spraying everything down, and funneling it all into the drain.

Do you happen to have a photo?

Do you mean a photo of the kitchen? There isn't much to see yet because it's an old building that still needs renovation.

Addendum: at the end, we laid a cotton rug between the rows and took it to the cleaners every few weeks. Certainly not in the spirit of the inventor, but if you want to be beautiful (parquet), you have to suffer...

It also always depends on what and how often you do something in the kitchen. I know more than enough people who have a kitchen at home costing 30,000 euros or more, but mainly just boil pasta water there, make coffee in the Jura, or put frozen food into the oven or microwave. There, the kitchen primarily has to look good; functionality is rather secondary.

Then parquet is of course a grateful option!

For others, the trend is increasingly towards a second kitchen in the pantry: that is where the dirty work is done while the show kitchen in the open-plan living area is clinically clean – parquet is then of course no problem either.