Parquet floors that can no longer be repaired?

The owner of the castle took us to the first floor of the villa and showed us a large room in the shape of an „L“, where on the floor there were partly castle packets, partly friezes placed in a tree, chipboards or here the top layer was completely missing. On the floor, over the years, carpets and other coverings had been hammered and glued to the parquet, there were partitions that were later demolished, and in addition to the remains of glue, there were remains of masonry work on the floor. The square castle two-layer parquets had largely detached, damaged or completely missing pieces of tread. And the friezes were all gray covered with a layer of dirt, mortar and glue. Quite understandably, the parquet floors did not look very presentable.

Preparation of repairs

Considering the scope of the planned repairs on the two-layer oak parquets, we decided to dismantle them and take them to the workshop. Before that, we documented the current condition and location and prepared the parquet passport. We marked and dismantled the castle parquet floors. We decided to leave the friezes in place because they were not as damaged as the square parquets. We had to repair a total of 136 pieces of castle parquet and produce 24 replicas.

Parquet description

Castle parquets have a two-layer construction and a square shape. The layered parquet consists of a 20 mm-thick lower support plate and an 8 mm-thick upper tread layer. The bottom board is composed of rectangular pieces of spruce laid next to each other and glued, and is connected at the ends with an inserted tongue to the cross piece that closes the ends. The upper layer is composed of 24 pieces of oak and is glued to the supporting layer with animal glue. The parquet is equipped with a groove on all four sides, into which a tongue is inserted at an angle of 45° during installation.

In the parquet workshop

First, we removed coarse dirt from all parquets and sorted them according to the type of damage. We approached the repairs with the utmost respect and tried to preserve as much of the original material as possible. Due to the considerable soiling of the parquet, there was dirt even under the tread layer and it was not possible to simply glue the loose parts, but it was necessary to dismantle them, then clean the substrate, straighten the deformed parts and re-glue and harvest. To complete the missing parts of the tread layer, we used parts from dismantled extremely damaged parquet, or period material. We used our own mixture of skin and bone glue for gluing.

Laying parquet

Castle parquet floors were laid according to a pre-created drawing on the original wooden base. Instead of nails, we used loose screws so as not to damage the grooves, at the same time to preserve the reversible laying system and also with regard to the part of the originally laid friezes and borders. So that the parquets in the area are not combined from old and new, we decided to complete the front part of the room with original parquets and in the back part to create a rectangle of handmade replicas with the same pattern, but from new material. In the part of the area between the friezes for the tree and the castle parquet, we created a border made of oak blanks. This created the illusion of two rooms that were originally there and were separated by a walk-through built-in wardrobe according to the architect’s design.

Surface treatment

After laying the repaired castle parquets, replicas, friezes and borders, we cleaned the entire area and thus removed age-old deposits of dirt, glue and mortar, especially in the part with the friezes, and finished cleaning the castle parquets. Special brushes were used to modify the surface structure. As a final surface treatment, we applied parquet wax to the parquet. The difference before and after repairs is visible at first glance.

The family villa in Borovina was built between 1914 and 1915 by the factory owner Hans Budischowsky. The owner of the then largest shoe factory in Třebíč, Carl Budischowsky und Söhne, assigned the project to the Prague architect of Jewish origin, Max Spielmann, a native of Kroměříž. He designed it as a castle in the neo-baroque style. On the ground floor with an entrance hall and a spiral staircase, there were representative spaces, such as a music lounge, a dining room, a winter garden or a men’s room. The first floor was used for private purposes and there were bedrooms, children’s rooms, guest rooms and a bathroom.

In 1931, the villa was bought by Josef František Waldstein-Wartenberg and served as a family residence. In the second half of May 1945, however, the family had to move out as part of the Beneš decrees, and the villa was nationalized. Over the years it has served various purposes, such as a girls‘ dormitory for up to 80 apprentices. At the end of the 1970s, the dormitory was closed and a reconstruction took place, when some partitions on the first floor were demolished so that the Borovin factory could set up a shoe museum here. In 2001, a private owner bought the castle and the almost five-hectare plot of land at an auction. The owner installed gas in the villa and added bathrooms. Some original elements such as stucco decoration, wall coverings, doors and windows and last but not least the parquet floors have been preserved and are still waiting for their repair.