My ultimate choice for flooring is always wood – it’s so tactile, (relatively) warm, hardwearing and versatile. But – apart from buying reclaimed planks for a kitchen floor once – I’d never given much thought to where it comes from. Obviously I’ve watched loads of Twin Peaks – I know what a saw-mill is. But the sourcing of new timber for floors had never really crossed my mind.

I therefore found it fascinating to read about the history of a company I’d not come across before – French Forest Floors – who are so proud of the process by which trees becomes the floor you walk on that they have put it at the heart of the company story. Remember the ‘great gales’ of 1987? Well they didn’t just affect south-eastern England, but France too. And while were all still sniggering at Michael Fish for having got his forecast wrong, the French government across the channel were putting a plan in place to make effective use of the thousands of oak trees that had been brought down in the forests of northern France. From this initiative, French Forest Floors was founded.

Rather than buying from lumber yards, French Forest Floors oversee the progress of the timber, right from its start as an acorn! Dedicated to sustainable forest management in France, Germany and Belgium, the company is involved with every step of the journey from cultivation, to harvesting the trees, to milling and transporting it.

I was especially struck by this image below, perfectly demonstrating where your floorboards come from – in every sense. Wood, when it is carefully and sustainably managed, is an incredible, renewable resource, which helps absorb carbon from the atmosphere as a tree grows, and stores it in the wood for the lifetime of a piece of timber. Recent years have seen an increased consumer demand for knowing exactly the farm that the meat on the dinner table comes from, and a good thing too. Surely this will soon be a feature of where we buy other, longer-lasting products for our home. It feels good to know that you can buy beautiful timber flooring of proven, responsible provenance.

Written in collaboration with French Forest Floors