Grading Rules
These are our wood flooring grading rules across all collections:
Wood grading is available across all Oak & Edge Flooring products. Within the flooring industry, grading standards can vary significantly between suppliers, with many companies applying their own interpretation of grading rules. For this reason, we believe it is important to clearly explain how we classify our timber and what each grade represents.
Our flooring is available in four grades:
Prime
Select
Nature
Rustic
Regardless of grade, every floor is finished using the same premium quality oils and lacquers, ensuring the final finish remains consistent throughout the collection. Whether you choose a clean Prime board or a heavily featured Rustic board, the quality of the finish, construction and manufacturing remains exactly the same.
The same principle applies to the structure of the flooring itself. Across all grades, we use high-quality oak and premium plywood sublayers to ensure stability, durability and long term performance. The difference between grades is purely visual and relates only to the natural character of the timber and the overall appearance of the finished floor.
A Prime board is not inherently “better” than a Rustic boar, it simply offers a cleaner, more uniform aesthetic. Rustic grades celebrate the natural knots, grain variation and character markings found within oak, creating a more textured and organic appearance.
Higher grades do typically carry a higher cost, though this is due to the rarity of the timber rather than the quality of the material itself. Oak trees naturally contain knots, branches and variations, making cleaner grades significantly more difficult to yield. On average, a tree may produce approximately:
15% Prime
30% Select / Nature
55% Rustic
These yields become even lower when producing wider plank flooring, which is one of the main reasons for the difference in pricing between grades.
As wood is a natural product, we allow for up to 5% crossover between grades across all collections.
Prime Grade
This is our highest grade, selected for its very low knot content with only pin knots allowed, sapwood is kept to a minimal with only small amounts of edge sap on one side if present. Colour variation is present but kept low.
Select Grade
Our select grade is the next grade down from prime, it has all the traits of prime with increased number of knots and larger knots are also allowed. Sap is more present than with prime grade. Colour variation is kept inline with prime grade with more tolerance allowed. Small end cracks are allowed, these are filled to match the oak flooring.
Nature Grade
Our nature grade has all the traits of prime and select grade with a higher allowed number of knots, the knots can also be larger in size, these would mostly contain sound knots. Nature grade also contains higher amounts of sapwood and a higher degree of colour variation between the planks.
Rustic Grade
Our rustic grade has all the traits of prime, select and nature but is allowed an unlimited number of knots that are larger in size. Sapwood levels are higher and variation is increased. Rustic grade is the most natural looking flooring option.
